What's The Right Way To Deal With YA Product Placement?
Posted by alli on 08-14-2008
One of the things we do as librarians (and book-bloggers) is illuminate the issues that are out there in the publishing world — What are people talking about and what books are making a splash. An issue that has come up in the past is the new practice of including brand-name marketing in the young adult book sector–literary product placement, if you will. Some titles even begin with product deals worked out first –characters, plot and story all come later.
The issue is: what's the right way to deal with YA product placement. Should the process be transparent to readers - and parents?
I've written about this before and I recently posted about an article in the LA Times about Alloy Entertainment. Primarily a book publisher, Alloy is branching out into new avenues such as television and movies. In the LA Times article Alloy is described rather harshly described as a "book factory" where "editors cook up ideas they think will appeal to teens and then hire writers to follow their outlines, similar to the way dramas and sitcoms are written for TV."
One library science professor was quoted in the article as saying, "The book series itself is about commodities — brands become a way to identify with the characters." Furthermore she noted, some librarians refuse to buy the books. A bit harsh, perhaps, after all many libraries shelve magazines like Vogue and Elle.
The article points out that "In the first four pages of The Clique, for example, a seventh-grader named Massie kicks off her "3-inch heels" and mentions that she owns a Mac, wears Chanel No. 19 perfume and Yves Saint Laurent lipstick, sleeps on Calvin Klein sheets, shops at Bergdorf Goodman and stays at the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood."
So the question is: Will books and other literary content become as much a part of a marketing strategy for brands as we see in other platforms? Is there another approach - another name - for the genre? The more that advertising intermingles with the writing process, the less literary these books become. How can the process become more transparent? That transparency would go a long way with librarians and teens. If teens knew the terms under which the books they love were written, they'd still read them and respect them for what they are.
