ABC's Modern Family: Why No Toyota Terror?

An article in this week’s Advertising Age and Automotive News (they’re sister publications) investigates why the family in the new hit sitcom ‘Modern Family’ “still drives Toyota product.” The author found it “jarring” that the family “chatted happily while traveling in, of all things, a Toyota.” The answer: Toyota paid for product placement, the contract runs through the end of the season, and many of the episodes have already been shot.

The article states that, in the past, when a company was hit by a crisis, such as a plane crash, all of that company’s ads were usually pulled as soon as possible. The author doesn’t seem to realize that this was done for the sake of the advertiser, in case it wanted to alter the message sent or wait until the crisis was over to resume advertising. It wasn’t done to distance the network from the advertiser, as the author assumes when asking why the network has risked “negative rub-off” by linking its hit show “to the brouhaha.”

It makes more sense to ask, as the article also does, why Toyota hasn’t requested that its cars be removed from the show. The answer in this case is obvious: the last thing Toyota would want to do is imply that its cars are too unsafe to drive by pulling them from the show.

Ultimately there’s no conflict, and so no real point to the article. The network wants the Toyotas in the show because they get product placement money and they don’t want to reshoot any scenes. Toyota wants to keep its cars in the show because it’s effective advertising and to do otherwise would increase generally unfounded suspicions about their safety. And there’s no valid reason the cars shouldn’t still be in the show, except that the scattered explicit product references can be mildly irritating.

What I personally found “jarring:” in the most recent episode the family let its oldest daughter, who just got her license on her third attempt and who is clearly not a safe driver, go off by herself in their brand-new Sienna minivan. Having drivers like this girl on the road without any supervision–now that’s unsafe.

Michael Karesh owns and operates TrueDelta, an online source of auto pricing and reliability data