Syndicated reruns double as unpaid ads enriching sponsors at creative labor’s expense

Evidence

But what of the intellectual property rights and the creative labor that produced this content that is so easily transported into a new, lucrative marketing context? “If you’re Subway you love this, because in effect Tina Fey is selling your sandwich, but you’re not paying Tina Fey the $2 million it would cost if you wanted to make her a spokesperson,” the executive elaborated, in an unexpectedly candid moment during our interview. “Well, it’s a bit of a gray area,” he later backtracked, when I questioned him about licensing rights, “but it’s common sense that everybody wins.” The sponsor certainly wins, being associated with creative content that the viewer actually wants to watch, as opposed to the conventional advertisements to which they have become so resistant. In addition, the sponsor lowers the cost of producing that advertisement. They merely slap their name on a creative brand that has already earned consumer loyalty. The local affiliate wins, by generating additional revenue and promoting its syndicated programs. The production ­company and broadcast network win because of the additional promotion their product receives. In DG Entertainment’s logic, Fey and the creative workers responsible for 30 Rock’s production also win because of this additional promotion, but as already demonstrated, creative labor loses out in the transmedia arrangement when content is considered marketing and when payment is received only for the original window of release. Proportionally, the sponsors, affiliates, and networks are ­profiting off these “promercials” far more than any of the creative workers, let alone the below-the-line workers. While the executive may claim that “the sum total of its many promotional parts” is beneficial to all involved, this equation is more complicated; like supply-side, “trickle-down” economics, the math never quite adds up in the worker’s favor. — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 395

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence base for the reader’s ‘fingerprints on artistic form’ thesis: shows that content-form marketing is the economic channel through which distributors capture creative value, connecting to the book’s Part One on copyright and Part Two on text.