Remembering the days of TV show sponsorship plugs

[Hawkee]

Another interesting part of commercial research and learning about commercials is another type of commercial that is often overlooked and these commercials are known as sponsorship plugs. These were often played during TV shows and soap operas usually with the announcer telling viewers what product was sponsoring that day's episode with the commercial playing afterwards. When I was doing commercial research this morning I ran into a few TV show sponsorship plugs and some shows did amazing ones. Take for instance if you watched Dallas in the 80's Dallas's sponsorship plugs were the actual commercials with the sound silent while the theme song played and the announcer talked about the sponsored product and I thought to myself why don't TV shows do commercials attached to the sponsorship plugs today and I thought it was pretty neat. The soap opera Guiding Light also did these types of commercials in the early years of it's debut and when you look at it I think they bring back nostalgia for people. A second type of these TV show commercial sponsorship plugs is the logo versions in a silent version and they have many variants too. Take for example As The World Turns in the 1989-1990 years of the soap opera used these types of commercials which were different sponsorship plugs for the first and second halves of each episode. It's really a shame that they don't do these types of commercials in TV shows today and TV show sponsorship plugs should really make a comeback to TV today

[Hawkee]

I think TV show sponsorship plugs should make a comeback because they were interesting commercials and now it seems the only station that does TV show sponsorship plugs is PBS with it's programming and some of the PBS sponsorship plugs were cool and PBS Kids had the neatest sponsorship plugs. Like do you remember the Juicy Juice sponsorship plug that PBS used to have before Arthur episodes?

[Hawkee]

I discussed this topic with my mom today and she remembers TV sponsorship plugs and she wishes they would make a comeback to TV shows. But it seems that the TV sponsorship plug commercials have been making a comeback to the Spanish language TV shows and not the English language TV shows and I wonder why? Because on several of my mom's Spanish language soap operas they promote Dawn commercials Verizon commercials and Coca-Cola commercials and it makes me think that these Spanish language soap opera producers probably pay these companies lots of money to promote the products but you never see this in English language TV shows and soap operas and I wonder why? I remember when soap operas and other shows used to sponsor different products and then show the accompanying commercials to go with it and it was a smart idea to help the product sell. TV show sponsorship plugs and commercials should make a comeback to TV because it was such a clever way to buy the product the commercial sponsoring the show was selling
Do you agree?

[stevea]

The cartoon show Toon In With Me is in its 5th season on MeTV, having completed 900 shows in early March. For the first time, Keven Fleming, a regular on the show, did a plug for Aspen Dental recently. That was a first time live plug on the show, and it's a rarity to happen at all on TV nowadays.

[Hawkee]

I did a mini-essay on this topic this morning and when I was searching Youtube I couldn't believe my eyes how TV show sponsorship plugs had changed and it seemed that the soap operas seemed to have the most sponsorship plugs of all TV shows. Like I found two commercial sponsorship plugs from ABC's All My Children sponsoring Kellogg's Frosted Flakes and another was from Clairol and they came out in 1991 and I thought it was cool and clever. A second TV show sponsorship plug I found was from a David Copperfield TV special where Kraft was a sponsor and it was an actual commercial and you never see TV shows do these kind of TV show sponsorship plugs today and these types of commercials should make a big comeback because they indeed help the product sell a lot

[Hawkee]

I think the actual reason why you don't see TV show sponsorship plugs today is because to TV show producers they see these sponsorship plugs costly to do and they would much rather spend money promoting the show with things like teaser trailers and episode promos. Even in game shows you used to see sponsorship plugs with commercials. Take for example Wheel Of Fortune used to have various products sponsor each round such as Advil Maxwell House and Zysal Allergy Medicine and Hershey's even did Pot Of Gold Week in the 90's to honor the Hershey's Pot Of Gold chocolates line. And in the short-lived syndicated version of Deal Or No Deal did commercial sponsorship plugs with Splenda and Listerine and it helped the show survive. But today I think the only channel you do see TV show sponsorship plugs is PBS because you can sponsorship plugs for Earth's Best Organic Baby Food during Sesame Street Chuck E. Cheese's during Barney And Friends Bob's Red Mill Flour during Lidia's Italian Table and so on. But TV shows really should bring sponsorship plugs back really soon in the future