With the recent lifting of the ban on product placement on UK commercial TV, yet another safeguard of our media’s editorial integrity has been lost.
 
Independent broadcasters will now be allowed to take payments for displaying commercial products during shows. 

At first glance this would seem a natural progression, after all product placement is nothing new. Starting in the nineteenth century companies spotted the popularity of the penny novel as a way of getting their name known and later evolved as the movie industry took off early last century.

It’s now ubiquitous across our film screens. James Bond has to be seen drinking a particular brand of vodka and he’s never seen out of his very British sports car with its added optional extras.

It’s so commonplace in fact that cinema audiences probably don’t even notice it’s happening and for marketeers that’s the whole beauty about it, selling their brand without the consumer even realising they’re being sold to.

Although the decision could be seen as a lifeline for a TV industry struggling against a tide of falling advertising revenues, according to reports on the BBC it could raise up to £100m a year, there is a downside to consider.

Certainly it’s a concern that advertisers are having more and more say about the content of our light entertainment programmes.
 
But what’s more worrying is that this trend for product placement is increasingly creeping into so called ‘news’ stories as well.

When advertisers start to influence what is news then the whole independence and objectivity of our journalism is under threat.

The news media is becoming increasingly blurred between what is factual, analysis and comment and what is nothing but advertising under another name.

To an over stretched and under resourced news desk, public relations has a crucial role to play in providing accurate information to help journalists write a balanced and informed story.

A story that readers know has been written free from any outside influence or control, one that they can have confidence in its integrity and balance.

But there is growing evidence that a tipping point could soon be reached where PR starts to take too much control of the news agenda. A lot of what we are now reading even in respected newspapers is being too heavily influenced by the PR industry.