Chuck’s “Road Trip” Beyond Product Placement

As excited as I was by tonight’s two-hour premiere of Chuck, it was a bit marred by a particular advertisement that I saw toward the beginning of the show. With DVR-remote in hand, I was skipping commercials when I noticed that the show was back on – I noticed that two characters from the show were in the car, so I stopped fast forwarding.

The clip felt very much like a car commercial and the product placement was incredibly apparent. With sweeping shots of the sedan driving on a country road and blatant shots of the big Honda “H”, I became a bit confused. Then, as the scene ended, sure enough – it was a Honda commercial.

I’m a huge proponent of new and creative advertising – I love it when an apparently out of touch corporation “gets it”, like Fox Searchlight’s effective use of Facebook as a marketing tool. However, this ad is shameless exploitation of viewers. The ad tricks people into watching it because they see the familiar faces of “Awesome” and Ellie, but before they realize it’s not part of the show, they’ve already seen it.

I realize that that’s kind of the point. Advertising is on some level is just about breaking through the distractions in people’s lives and trying to get them to buy something. If you can do that by incorporating characters from a show people are interested in, all the better. The issue that I have is the horrible writing – it’s completely removed from the plot of the show, totally irrelevant, and not ever referenced again.

It’s almost a parody of itself – the blatant car commercial style of filming was bad enough, but the NBC references were nauseating. It was like a kid writing sentences with “Vocab of the Week” trying to cram as many obtuse words into as few sentences as possible – “we just got back from the Winter Classic (aired on NBC)”, “Chuck gave me all-access passes to the Vancouver Olympics (airing on NBC)”. Please.

Why the hell would people from Burbank, CA want to see the Winter Classic between the Philly Flyers and the Boston Bruins? These individuals are all very California-based and this simply doesn’t make sense to the point of distraction. Additionally, how would unemployed-Chuck have access to “all-access passes” to the Olympics? Those would cost thousands of dollars and are probably incredibly difficult to get.

I appreciate the ad’s intentions, but it fell short of what it was trying to accomplish. For ads like this to be successful, they need to be better incorporated into the plot of the show and probably written by the actual writers so the dialog isn’t mangled garbage.