The P.P. Guy is Coming

Veni Vici Entertainment takes product placement to a new level by introducing “The P.P.Guy,” a sitcom about a product placement agent.

But the products that he comically struggles to get into shows are real product placements in his own show. This allows for 100% seamless integration of the product placement.

In the program, a hustling Eddie Edwards, has set up a product placement agency named “The P.P. Guy.” He constantly struggles, on the one hand arguing with clients and on the other with TV networks and movie studios.

And when they are not giving him a hard time, his roaring, ranting preacher father-in-law, the Reverend Marsden, gives him grief. Eddie’s wife, Abigail, who pursues a career as an actress, tries to be a buffer between hustling Eddie and the preacher who rains upon Eddie the wrath of the righteous, denouncing that evil, deceitful product placement business.

Eddie doesn’t win his favor when he points out that churches may have been the original product placement people with bibles placed in hotel rooms.

In describing the concept for “The P.P. Guy,” Andy Halmay, the producer, tells an old, Russian joke in which a peasant pushing a wheelbarrow filled with sand comes to the border where a border guard eyes him with suspicion. The guard sifts through the sand for contraband. Finding nothing he lets the peasant through. The next day the peasant shows up again with a wheelbarrow filled with sand. The border guard sifts through the sand, finds nothing and lets him pass. This is repeated day after day. Finally, the guard breaks down in tears and says to the peasant, “Comrade, I know you are smuggling, and I don’t care. I will do nothing. But it is driving me crazy. Please tell me what are you smuggling?” The peasant shrugs, “Wheelbarrows.”

“’The P.P. Guy’ is analogous to that joke,” says Halmay. The product placement is signposted as a product placement. In fact, the product to be placed is what partially provides the framework for the episodic plots. And the products may belong to the actual sponsor of the show.

Halmay, who was an award winning Madison Avenue creative executive, Y&R, JWT, B&B, Ted Bates, is concurrently pitching the show to advertisers and ad agencies as well as to networks. He feels it will appeal to advertisers sufficiently to make it an AFP (advertiser funded program)

“The P.P. Guy” reminds us that Shakespeare may have had it wrong. All the world is not a stage and all the men and women not merely players. Today we’re all hucksters or consumers.

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