Here’s hoping, but it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Ford is going to start forcing ads on you in your own car [0], and Samsung is planning to make all of its devices “smart”. I can’t wait for the day when my overpriced microwave forces me to watch a 30 second ad before it cooks my food.
It used to be that if you weren’t paying, you were the product. But these companies figured out something better - they can make you pay to be the product.
So this article about injecting an ad into an author’s work without their consent, was made by taking content from another author, repackaging it, and sticking an ad in it?
But no, those blacked out sections are there in the original book, not added by the blog poster. Probably to stretch the few ad sentences over a whole page (or two).
1. Outline the ad bits, and show that they are integrated in the middle of the text (aka it’s not a page of soup ad in the middle of the novel as you might assume).
2. Limit the risks of IP issues due to unauthorised reproduction even though this is just two pages out of a 350-odd pages novel (so almost certainly fair use).
As a teenager I found this exact same ad in a Star Trek novel from the library.
My first naive impression with these black bars was exactly as you said, that the original text is "under" them and just stuff incidentally referring to soup was left visible. "Look how clever we are, changing a replicator scene to a noodle-soup scene with just a bit of tweaking".
But it wasn't, of course. Its just a way to make you read it because you think its somehow still part of the novel. After the ad, the whole page starts again with its real (and completely different) content.
Within the creative industry in Japan Nissin's sponsorships are pretty common and well respected.
For example steamboy, one of th most expensive anime productions, relied on it. So the placement in ff is if anything a mark of quality.
Furthermore Nissin has a pretty strong brand in Japan. Their museum is a pretty popular local visit destination. Their souvenir cup noodles are a common sight at regular family homes.
Japan sort of never lost the soap opera style product sponsorship. Thanks to the production committee style of funding anime the sponsorships serve as key early money. Aka, that specific product placement is itself an artistic expression.
Japan is more than capitalist enough that their major brands are also valued parts of their culture.
FFXV is already a modern Western[0] RPG where the main characters drive a luxury car and wear tech goth leather jackets. And SE's #4 flagship is a Disney advertisement.
Why? It’s so innocuous and a bit funny. It doesn’t compromise on any aspect of the gameplay. Sure, they could have spent a little more effort to make the image fit the final fantasy theme, but companies get weird about how their image is used.
The way Mr. Pratchett describes the ad, it reminds me a lot of the ads one of his characters kept adding to their "moving pictures" in the book of the same name ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Pictures_(novel) ).
Perhaps this incident is where he got the idea from?
So if anything I wonder if it's the other way round - the publisher reading Moving Pictures and thinking that it was a great idea? Or maybe Terry had seen this in older books and written it into the story, not expecting that it would happen to him?
The Publisher could even argue that it's a rather meta joke they added into the book, which fits really well - but I don't think I'd want to have that argument.
No, from the same blog post: "Pratchett was not the only one with the soup adverts, I remember at least one Star Trek novel and a few non-franchise ones having the same stuff in it. The whole thing was a holdover from the 50s or 60s, when practices like that were more common, especially with publishers of cheap genre fiction."
I have a copy of that edition and I remember being very confused and annoyed by the ad. It's also something I don't remember seeing in other books but I could be wrong.
I switched to reading his novels in English (imports from the UK, expensive but worth it).
Heyne is well known by now for their questionable translation work, at least in the genre fiction section. Covers get modified towards more blandness, language gets defanged, etc..
One of the more prominent examples in recent times is their translation of Gideon the Ninth and its sequels (international bestseller, Nebula and Hugo shortlisted, "easy money" when importing a work). It went so badly they apparently stopped publishing the series altogether past the second book.
Well this website sets a new low for the increasingly terrible experience of browsing the modern internet. Pop up at the top? Nope. Pop up from the bottom? Nope! Pop up from the right hand side covering half my entire browsing window with no option to close it.
So what I gather from this article is
>Did you know that German
>paid product placement into
>international writers? Yes, it’
>this Neil Gaiman thread).
I remember this ad. I read a different book from the same publisher back in the days and was completely offended by having an ad in a book I just bought. The upside was that it could be removed without removing any text from the book.
As someone who's read and loved a lot of pulp fiction from this publisher, it's never bothered me. It was clearly separate from the normal text and you knew it after a couple of times; if I remember correctly, they were done in a low key amusing way.
Yeah. I remember such an ad in a German book I had. It was the only ad in that old book and this ad didn't age well: it was for a product not offered anymore. This ad was tailored to the story, something like this: "In a different vein, wouldn't be it nice if the hero could enjoy product X?"
It was on two pages such that you could tear it out. The first page was almost empty with a small teaser and on the other page you had the ad text and a small logo.
I found it very weird and it is awful because it tears you out of the story. You lose the flow.
The main problem is surely that everything about modern life that Pratchett tangentially referred to was inevitably the victim of his mockery of how absurd it was - so were an ad for instant soup to appear halfway through the adventures of Rincewind, Sam Vines or (my personal favourite) Lord Vetinari, it would surely be interpreted by any half-clued-in reader as an object of ridicule...
I don't get it, why do this, when you would just insert a pamphlet of an ad between the pages of each book (as a bookmark) or put a single 4sheet of ad between the pages as it is bound?
Both would be unacceptable to me, but at least it wouldn't be AS horrifying as literally editing the text and putting product placement in between the story lines.
I wonder is product placement/native advertising a thing in literature at all. It's certainly a big deal in TV; that's why, despite no human who did not actually work for Microsoft ever having bought a Windows Phone 8 device, House of Cards was full of them, say.
Could be a great little earner for writers of "airport novels", especially since that style of thriller often uses brands of clothes worn, vehicles driven, locations visited, drinks consumed, and firearms fired to build a connection with the real world anyway.
I'm suddenly very suspicious of modern-ish novels with named cigarette brands (most places ban nearly all advertisement of cigarettes these days, but I doubt anyone has gotten round to regulating cigarette product placement in books...)
Wow, I’m German, but I never heard of anything like this. Though I now remember first/last page ads in sci-fi pulp novels from the 70s/80s, never thought much of that :D
This was product placement in the middle of the text, with the characters of the book himself enjoying a nice Maggi soup. Without authorization by the author.
