“Nothing starts a buzz on Twitter quite like prime-time TV and Apple products,” Karissa Giuliano reports for CNBC. “Naturally, ABC’s hit TV-series, Modern Family, tapped into both last month.”
“On the last Wednesday in February, Modern Family aired an episode that was shot entirely on Apple products. titled “Connection Lost.” The episode revolved around the entire extended family communicating via iPhones, iPads and a MacBook,” Giuliano reports. “While Claire Dunphy sits in a Chicago airport, she uses her MacBook Pro to communicate with her family in hopes of ultimately locating her missing older daughter, Haley. The rest of the family chimes in via FaceTime to give their two cents, do a little cyber-research on Haley and generally amp Claire’s anxiety up to a solid ten.”
“Twitter users didn’t seem to mind the overt product placement,” Giuliano reports. “When it came to emotionally-charged tweets sent during the show, the number of posts that mentioned Apple outnumbered those about the episode’s characters, according to social media insights firm Mashwork.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: That Modern Family episode should win the Holy Grail for Product Placement. The actual Holy Grail. It can’t be topped. 21:35 worth of free advertising smack dab in network primetime in a Top 5 show.
P.S. If you haven’t seen the episode, it’s in the iTunes Store here.
Related articles:
Modern Family’s all-Apple episode airs tonight – February 25, 2015
‘Modern Family’ episode shot entirely on Apple iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros – February 17, 2015
Entire episode of ABC’s ‘Modern Family’ centered on Apple iPad (with video) – April 1, 2010
I’d never seen the show but it looks very funny.
Quartz and AP article quotes:
The result is an episode that’s incredibly effective and very funny, without ever actually seeming like an ad. In part, that’s because—surprise!—Apple didn’t pay a cent to be involved. Instead, the idea came from Modern Family co-creator Steve Levitan, who co-wrote and directed the episode. Levitan was inspired in part by a FaceTime chat with one of his college-age daughters. “This came from life and it made sense,” Levitan told the Associated Press. Show producers sought out and received Apple’s blessing, of course. There’s precedent for the relationship—in 2010 a Modern Family episode centered around Ty Burrell’s character Phil Dunphy pining for an about-to-be-released iPad. Apple didn’t pay for inclusion in that episode either.
No self-respecting fandroid will ever allow themselves to believe that Apple didn’t (nor does it ever) pay for product placement.
They used to do it in a circumspect way — in kind. Show runners would need the characters to use a laptop or a cellphone; production designers would then call Cupertino and ask for a bunch of MBPs or iPhones, and Apple would usually send them down (for free, of course). In recent years (since Steve’s death, it seems), we are increasingly often seeing Apple devices with obscured logos. These devices are paid for by the production (instead of obtaining them for free from Apple). It seems that someone at Apple had said “Enough is enough! How much longer are we going to be supplying Hollywood with free computers and phones!?” The free promotion continues, though; everyone can clearly recognise an iMac, even if the logo is covered…
Web therapy with Lisa kudrow not only have one episode entirely on Apple products but the all series, all episodes are on MacBooks or iPhones… And it is hilarious also.
Five years ago this would have been science fiction. What I found interesting was how normal it all seemed. Except for the unusually high speed and low latency of the free wifi at O’Hare this was completely natural.