Marketing people have been saying that product placement is the next “big thing” in advertising, but up until recently it’s been fairly subtle in most instances. Sure, there are the blatantly obvious “pass me a can of Coke” shots in TVs and movies, but most of the things I’ve seen have been noticing a Dell logo as the camera passes an LCD monitor in a CSI episode, or seeing a brief glimpse of a Nikon logo as the characters use the camera to take pictures (also in CSI). The image above was taken from a recent episode of Smallville, and it was probably the most blatant product placement I’d seen in years. The camera must have stayed on that shot of the Sprint logo & phone for a good two seconds – far longer than the user needed to grasp that it was Chloe that was calling. Is this the future of advertising? Some would say yes – we live in the era of the PVR and Tivo, where commercials are irritating distractions that we all want to skip past (I fall into this camp – I loathe real-time TV now). Advertising is what pays for most of the shows we want to watch however, so eventually there’s going to be a fall-out with advertisers who know no one is watching their ads. Until that happens, there will continue to be experiments with product and brand promotions inside our TV and movie content. How bad will it get before we start to feel like we’re watching one long commercial? That’s a topic for another day…