"Ugly Betty": A Healthy Choice for Product Placement

By Ed Martin TV / Video Download Archives

Healthy Choice Fresh Mixersis the lunch of choice for Amanda Tanen, the wonderfully wacky receptionist who runs the front desk at Mode magazine on Ugly Betty.

Who knew?

If you recorded last week’s episode of the sparkling ABC comedy series and played it back later, you probably weren’t paying a lot of attention to the commercials inside it. But even the DVR-empowered couldn’t miss the scene in which Amanda not only revealed that her desk drawer is crammed full of Fresh Mixers, but actually made a creative pitch for them.

Amanda had taken delivery of two balls of exotic cheese for her co-worker Betty Suarez and assumed that Betty was going to eat them. “One slice of that fatness or 10 of these,” Amanda taunted, opening her drawer to expose her stash of Fresh Mixers, which are distinguished from other Healthy Choice microwavable products because they do not have to be kept frozen. (The HC slogan: “Mad Fresh from Your Desk!”) Sexy Amanda then began stacking Fresh Mixers in her lap and purred, “I totally win.”

Sure enough, a quick back-scan revealed that there had been a commercial for Fresh Mixers before that sequence. Another followed later in the show.

Apparently the folks at ABC and Reveille (the company that produces Ugly Betty) are getting especially creative in the way they incorporate product placement into their programs. What was particularly noteworthy about the inclusion of the Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers brand in the episode was that it was seamlessly integrated into a primary storyline on the show. Granted, the overhead shot of Amanda’s drawer filled with the product was about as subtle as a brick to the skull, but in every other way it felt totally organic, as if that brief sequence had been included in the original script. The big reveal was somewhat humorous and completely in character for Amanda. Further, it played directly out of the arrival of the all-important cheese, which Betty planned to utilize in an effort to smooth things over with her former beau Gio, the sandwich guy. (Heartbroken Gio had come upon the hard-to-get cheese during a trip to Italy, but after buying some and returning home he had to surrender it to customs at JFK Airport. Betty’s boss, Mode editor Daniel Meade, called celebrity chef Mario Batali and asked him to send some over to Betty.)

Watching the episode, it seemed that so brazen a plug for Fresh Mixers would have been difficult to work in during any other time in the story. Without the cheese, which moved the plot along for much of the hour, how would Healthy Choice have been worked in?

I hadn’t seen such effective product placement in a television show since Dinah craved Pringles chips throughout her pregnancy on Guiding Light. Interestingly, the Pringles weren’t incorporated into that Procter & Gamble Productions soap opera as part of a business plan. The writers simply thought it would add some realism to the program if the characters ate and talked about a specific product, the way real people do. Somewhere out there I am certain that office workers are talking about Fresh Mixers during their lunch hours.

Ed Martin

Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage. He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a…