Watching the first season the absurd amount of Apple product placement was annoying me.

Yet it wasn’t - to me - the sheer amount, but the lack of diversity.

I do a lot of sports activities to control my emotional state. Many people around me use headphones, most of them actually Apple/Beats. Yet it’s never all of them using beats. Many have Sony or mpow.

In Business Video calls I tried a shfloat on headphones during the pandemic. Particularly because of lack of choice during the hot time of the pandemic. Having days with 6hrs on the phone/webcam to kick of a big project was challenging on many levels. And, my POV again, there was an evolution to Air Pods. Many people use them today. Some stuck at typical helpdesk on-ear gear, some use their notebooks.
It’s not that Apple Pods has been the best. Many people just walked that path during the pandemic because of what I believe is a mixture of actual availability, personal comfort and seeing others with it, so it must be ok.
Yet even in this scenario not everyone* has apple products.

Finally I put the focus on iPhone and FaceTime. See this post as a product placement but the pandemic put a burden on parents in my region of then world. Schools closed for month, offices, shops & everything, too. Travel was limited. Nightly curfews.
So on the one hand I bonded much, much tighter with my 9yr old daughter then this would be usual at that age. On the other hand these bonds were broken. Me working in IT directly responsible, I had to spend days away. Suddenly due to a power problem 3 switches simultaneously had corrupted their flash drive, all down, backups,… I had to leave home for three days and we were stuck to FaceTime. No other service provided a even remote feeling of being at home with here them for example watching a movie together with FaceTime . Yet not everyone has an iPhone. People cannot use FaceTimes across brands. Deliberately by Apple.

So, to come to my conclusion, please excuse the long introduction:

I have seen product placement. Big discussion among YouTube and social media. Big discussion with Coca Cola, McDonalds and Red Bull along with Sport events. It’s very prominent, very annoying. Very subtle. The refreshing taste of beer. We all now the adverts with that sound of beer flowing into a glas. Or Coca Cola. And how hard these companies work to make us believe Coca Cola would actually be more refreshing then water after sports.

The problem with Ted Lasso is the lack of Apple products diversity. They have one design of laptops. They have one iPhone. Air pods. Tv station. It’s really annoying that everyone has the same iPhone in Ted Lasso. It’s like they have two iPhones and two laptops on set and just switch them during scenes and actors.

It’s not like people wouldn’t use their products actually as depicted in Ted Lasso. To me it partially was how I handled my life during pandemic, not so much product placement. It’s how a certain kind of people lives. It’s part of their story about these exact kind of people.

But the absurd amount of the same apple product just makes it ridiculous.

I would go so far to suggest that apple will reduce the amount since marketing must have noticed that people at some point find it annoying that their super expensive iPhone isn’t as exclusive if everyone on Ted lasso has the same one.

It’s most noticeable with notebooks to me. Because that’s were I experience most diversity in real life. People have so many vendors, … the amount of Apple Books in Ted Lasso is unnatural.

So, yes. Obscene amount of apple products. But apple wouldn’t include Samsung Notebooks. So it is maybe not completely product placement but a necessity due to the plot and apple being apple not allowing any competitors.

Eventually I’d like to point out how annoyed I am by product placement in TV shows. Big show runners intended at female viewers are stuck with make up and fashion products to a amount where it is annoying to watch. I recall a TV show where they suddenly praised the features of the car they were using or people say „oh nice shirt“ and the hero was wearing it the whole episode. Even if no specific product it used, the bottles or colors clearly resemble Coca Cola….

I wouldn’t be mad if the journalist would review more shows and we have not only apple bashing but a generalized TV show discussion.