Advertainment?

Macleans has a good look at the growing practice of using product placement to help pay for television programs:

But increasingly, embedded advertising -- or "product integration" -- is becoming fundamental to how TV programs are conceived and produced. Corporations strike deals to have their brands built into the storylines of hit shows in order to piggyback on the emotional connections audiences have forged with the characters.

The article is an excellent review of the social and economic forces which are inducing television companies to "embed" products in the shows themselves. (Does that verb conjure up Gulf War II visions for anyone else?) For me, at least, the article also highlights why the web is just better than TV. You can use TiVo and regular old bathroom breaks to skip TV commercials, but not the junk that's embedded in the shows - especially when an Excursion's grille is right up in yours. On websites, I can either eliminate ads with pop-up killers or simply tune them out. The other day, I was interrupted while reading a Times article by a survey on one of their advertisers - one whose ads I had never even noticed. So much for my "mindshare."

The article also provokes more thought about the steady bifurcation of American society and culture into one realm for the elite and one for the rest of us - e.g., paid TV programming without embedded commercial content (but itself a product) versus free TV programming with such content. A few years back, I heard a scholarly paper which connected the 1990s expansion of express-delivery services like FedEx with the concurrent rise of private security firms offering both electronic and human security. The author argued that these two phenomena, along with others such as gated communities, indicated Americans' renewed comfort with the elite's explicit right to better services: overnight postal delivery, higher levels of personal security, improved medical care, greater access to political power. This right has always existed, but it had been tempered by populism and high middle-class living standards during much of the 20th century. I'm not sure if the historian's right, but it's an interesting idea that seems to align with this Maclean's piece.