How I Met Your Zookeeper: Advertisers Fling New Ads At Old Reruns

As you may have heard, there was a recent calling-out of both Zookeeper and How I Met Your Mother as a result of an ad for the former being digitally inserted into a syndicated rerun of the latter. The general practice isn't new, but there's something about this particular example that's especially irksome, and not just because it's been done in the service of a Kevin James talking-gorilla movie.

First, though, let me indulge in the harrumphy (but obligatory) finger-waggle that the entire practice of treating every inch of the television screen as a revenue opportunity regardless of whether those pixels/lines/electrons/Lite Brite pegs are already occupied is galling. Yes, yes: programming exists primarily to support commercials and not vice versa, and the increasing use of technologies like DVRs is forcing advertisers to be more creative and/or aggressive.

Stop and think, though: Is there any other creative product in which this practice would be acceptable? This isn't simple product placement; it's altering a work that has been completed and published. Imagine turning to page 46 of a book and finding a sticker praising Pepsi covering a passage about the protagonist wondering about whether he would get tenure. Or purchasing a song on iTunes only to discover that a five-second Wal-Mart jingle had been recorded in the short instrumental break between the chorus and the next verse. (If they didn't want advertising there, why didn't they include any singing?) Harrumphing accomplished!

But even if we sigh and resign ourselves to never again having another surface that somebody, somewhere won't see as empty billboard space, the Zookeeper incident goes well beyond, say, layering a fake package of Oreos onto a table next to Ross Geller. Oreos exist within the world of Friends, even if, I should point out, Ross would by necessity be pretending that they don't right at that moment.

Mother is an odd choice for in-program insertions, though. It's not simply that the episode the much-debated screenshots come from ("Moving Day") originally aired in 2007. More than most sitcoms, Mother has a rather explicit time frame. How explicit? Well, the very first line of the episode is, "Kids, in the spring of 2007..." So it's not an ideal candidate to layer in an advertisement for a movie released in July 2011, is what I'm saying.