CBC’s new daytime show, Steven and Chris, launches today. You’ll see tips on home decor, fashion, food and health. What you won’t see are sponsors’ brands integrated into the show.

Yet.

CBC TV’s sales department is actively looking for companies who want to place their brand directly within the program content.

But it’s not “product placement,” according to Praveen Amirtharaj, CBC TV’s director of marketing. Like previous brand-integrations on CBC TV shows, Amirtharaj says the show’s producers will drive how a product or company’s logo will appear in the program.

On the Gill Deacon Show, which last year held this slot on the daytime schedule, producers asked sales to find a specific company. “It was the producers who came to us and asked us [to sign the board game] Cranium, Amirtharaj told me. “They wanted her to play a game on the show, so we found Cranium. It’s not like we had Cranium sitting on the side and said ‘Gill, what can you do with Cranium?’ It was the other way around. That’s different than the privates who [tell their show producers] ‘I have a stable of products. How many shows can you get it into?”

On the show The Tournament, Amirtharaj says the sponsor, Kia Motors, was sought because the script called for it. “One of the characters guy owned a dealership and another character worked there,” he said. “There was a reason for it to be there.”

How It Would Look
I asked him how brand integration might play out on the Steven and Chris show. “Let’s say the show producers tell us they want to do a story on healthy living and they’re doing a cooking section involving dairy products…. We could say ‘You know what, the Dairy Farmers have a nutritional opportunity with cheese.’ ”

As for disclosure, Amirtharaj says it depends on the show. Sometimes it’s listed in the credits as “promotional consideration by,” but only if the placement isn’t obvious.

Actively Seeking Sponsors
But while Amirtharaj says show producers direct the sales department to find a particular type of sponsor, CBC’s head of “brand activation” Jamie Michaels seemed to be a little more on the hard-sell side. He told Media in Canada that the Steven and Chris show would make an excellent because “It’s got a live studio audience with that kind of feel — which we believe we can really capitalize on in working with sponsors on contesting, giveaways and, ideally, brand integration and branded segments.”

“There’s no question it targets women, so it will work very well for female-skewed products. And we want to leverage that with our sponsors,” he added.

The magazine says the program’s potential exposure for advertisers is “desirable,” adding “The hosts are so high-profile that their frequent public appearances - such as one they did last month for the opening of Home Depot Canada’s ‘Project’ prototype store in Richmond Hill, Ont. - invariably draw excited crowds and often end up on TV news clips.”

No sponsors have been signed up so far. The program, shot in live-to-tape format, debuts today at 2:00 p.m. local time, 2:30 p.m. NT.

What do you think? Have you seen other brand integrations on CBC shows? How did they compare to private stations’ placements?