My faith in the infinity of cynical opportunism is reaffirmed: It turns out that rather than just buying ads, corporations in the US are buying entire episodes of TV shows, having them themed around their product. The example here is an episode of Friends (some American sitcom or something, I think), whose plot and setting were themed around a shop known as The Pottery Barn. Though, on one level, they're only following the lead of the US Government's anti-drug office.

We can undoubtedly expect to see more of this kind of thing, both in the traditional script-buying sense (commercial TV show scripts in the 21st century are likely to become a battleground of advertisers and marketers, with anything unpaid-for being squeezed out to make room, adding new layers of surreality to the alternate universe on TV, and where this doesn't happen, with digitally inserted product placement. Probably not in product-laden sitcoms and soaps, as the producers and advertisers would undoubtedly sue if their product placement was diluted with electronic insertions. Though perhaps we can expect to see digitally inserted products start popping up in news footage (perhaps in interesting ways; would a company pay to have a competitor's product inserted into a serial killer's personal effects?), and into older, pre-product-placement programmes.

Want to say something? Do so here.

Note to spammers: This comment system applies the rel=nofollow attribute to the poster's URL and all links. Posting links to this page will not improve their search engine rankings.

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot, please enter the text in the image on the right in the field below it.

Your Comment:

Remember my details.

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.