The television show 30 Rock is a master class in media education and critique. Being a show about working a show gives it a lot of room to make fun of, and air gripes about the way television is created and seen, but it doesn’t stop there. As 30 Rock is a show that is aggressively intended to be “a part of our universe,”—reference upon reference to modern pop culture make sure of that—if a usually exaggerated part, 30 Rock loves to spear other parts of our world that it finds ridiculous. Even though 30 Rock loves to make fun of television, it is important to remember that the show is still on television, and being on television, it requires money to produce, and they get that money through product placement. Don’t worry, though, they’re eager to poke fun at product placement while continuing to advertise for various products.
The examples of 30 Rock’s product placement used in this essay, and how they satirize the very idea come in three separate episodes spread across the length of the show. The jokes are done in different ways.
First is the Snapple product placement. This is the least noticeable, least joke-y of the three. The scene begins with Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) saying that using their show to sell products is a bad idea. Pete Hornberger (Scott Adsit) cuts in almost immediately, lauding his approval of Diet Snapple. The cast sits in the writers’ room essentially just listing facts about Snapple, what they like about Snapple, and they even dip into the “sex sells” idea when Cerie Xerox (Katrina Bowden) looks at the writers—and into the camera coincidentally—and says “[She] only dates guys that drink Snapple.” This conversation takes a noticeably long amount of time, and is quite obviously intended to criticize product placement, but is not parodied anymore than talking a long time about a product.
Second most noticeable is for the Capital One Cover Card. It’s a lot shorter, but certain techniques they use for this joke make it pop more, and is a clearer and more direct joke about product placement. Taking only two lines, Pete says “I could cut the product placement for Capital One,” to which Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) immediately responds, “Oh, you can’t do that. The Capital One Venture Card is amazing!” While mentioned only once, Pete called product placement by name, and Jack enters into a cartoonish, commercial-y tone, talking extremely out of character and randomly defending an item he’s never mentioned before.
30 Rock absolutely skewers product placement once more in an early episode where Liz lists off a few facts about Verizon’s latest phone, the camera—which she looks directly into—zooms in on her face, and she says “Can we have our money now?” It is a completely impossible to ignore critique of product placement once again.
30 Rock balances on a fine line between teaching the audience about product placement, and participating in it. They know it’s ridiculous, but they also need it, so they advertise by making it into a joke.
Shannon Lachman says
I used 30 Rock as an example in one of my post as well. I thought of the Snapple Product placement first. I just found that really obvious because it did not just occur in a part of an episode, but the product placement was woven into the entire plot of the show. I find this worse than the Verizon one because they changed their actual plotline to get money from the company. I think the best example of pranking while incorporating product placement is the Verizon one. But all of these examples, while kind of biting the hand that feeds them, are still examples of product placement and 30 Rock still got money for making fun of them. I think this is exactly the problem with mainstream examples of culture jamming and pranking. They reach a wide audience but are inauthentic.