Bing Ads Prompt Lawsuit
By Harry McCracken | Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Advertising Age is reporting that a Delaware company is suing Microsoft’s ad agency over ads for Bing that were integrated into the TV show The Philanthropist. I’m not a big prime-time watcher, so this is the first I’ve heard of this:
Commercials for Bing were filmed on-set using actors from the show, which made its debut this summer and stars James Purefoy and Neve Campbell. The Bing-themed ads appeared between the TV programming and regular commercial breaks.
Still unclear: Why this idea is patentable in the first place, or how it’s fundamentally different from the ads that were deeply embedded into old radio shows–I mean, Jack Benny and pals not only discussed Jello every week, but the Benny program was named after the stuff.
[Full discloure: Bing is a Technologizer advertiser.]
2 Comments
Read more:
2 Comments For This Post
August 27th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Don’t worry, the 5 other people who watched the show besides myself have stopped by now and have forgotten the entire ad (until now, god that show was horrible). That said, this is simple product placement. No, it wasn’t a part of the episode (it tied to it very loosely) but that doesn’t really matter. You can see this all over the place (the entire cast of Black Gold drink Miller Lite, Coke or Pepsi can prominently displayed on a table of just about any show, NCIS always drives Chrysler vehicles) so what this companies beef? They’re patenting time stamps? How tight do we get with this? 1 second is okay, a milli or nano-second off and you’re okay? If I were the judge I would throw this case as far as I could away from any legal proceeding.
August 28th, 2009 at 9:35 am
We need knowledgeable judges willing to say “WTF” and throw these cases out … of course, they’ll just find a clueless judge somewhere else and … off we go again. There are so many broken systems they’re feeding on each other.