That's advertainment!

I guess I knew that they were doing this sort of thing from the outset of the series, but with my normal Sunday night programming taking a break for the Grammys, I caught up with Alias for the first time since the Super Bowl, only to be subjected to a really heavy-handed Ford promo during the actual show itself. It was then hammered home by about eighteen Ford commercials.

Wow, talk about annoying. If it were only one or the other, maybe it wouldn't have seemed quite so onerous. Or maybe if the part during the show were a tad more subtle. Except, of course, I'm hard-pressed to imagine that there's a TV executive, or more importantly, an advertising executive, that knows what the word "subtle" means.

The buzz is that with the advent of digital video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV, more and more viewers will be skipping commercials, so advertisers are looking to be featured in the content itself in order to compensate. And then digital editing may allow for product placements to change when a show is rerun. It's an interesting little war between technology and content, in that the content biz is inextricably tied to the advertising side. That's ultimately where the (pop) cultural battles are being fought nowadays, as evidenced by the epic battle between file-sharing software and CD-burners on the one hand, and the Recording Industry Association of America. Who will win? I've heard it said that you can't stop progress. I've never heard that said about entertainment.