From the True, the Good, the Beautiful to the Truly Beautiful Goods. Audience Identification Strategies on German "B-Television" Programs

German television threatens to become, for the most part, the bearer of advertising messages. This trend is explicit in the presentation of goods during blocks of advertising and in the promotion of merchandise through product placement. But, more importantly, it is implicitly visible in the tendency of programming concepts to conform to advertising strategies and of individual program segments to adopt the aesthetics of commercials. An inane positiveness radiated by every participant, the inclusion of clips, soft focus, and catchy music, among other devices illustrate a development which I consciously refer to as BTV (in analogy to B-movies). Neil Postman formulated the thesis of television programming as a derivative of advertising or inverted, advertising as a parameter of television programming for American television in the mid-1980s.1 Siegfried Zielinski described German television in the age of competing new media as advertisement television.2 Just as relevant is the question to

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