Franchising Friday Night Lights

Extending product placement: The Dillon Chronicle

Example #4: The Dillon Chronicle

As the Gossip Girl franchise demonstrates, product placement is both more and less difficult to achieve in complex realist shows. The presence of known brands can contribute to a realist aesthetic; however, product placement that is too overt can be distracting. Just as it is integrated into the television shows themselves, product placement can be situated in digital extensions, but it must be done in a natural way.

A website for the high school newspaper (referred to in several episodes of Friday Night Lights) primarily offers opportunities for presaging storylines, filling in story details and adding to the canon. However, it also attempts to naturally integrate product placement by way of website ads. The ads are created around three major promotional deals the show is involved in (Applebee's, Under Armour, and Chevrolet) and incorporate details from Friday Night Lights -- such as a car dealership owned by a recurring character -- that might do more to attract the user's attention.

A digital extension in this vein is particularly effective during a hiatus. Since Friday Night Lights intentionally leaves time gaps in its narrative, depicting only the four months of the year when football is played, the "stories" in The Dillon Chronicle provide detailed information that reduce the need for elaborate exposition in a season premiere. The website also offers some limited interactivity in the form of a poll question that refers to an event from the show's storyline. The "Opinion" page, which currently has a message soliciting columnists, could easily be adapted to include a "columnist application" or other form that can be used to collect information from users.