NBC’s Blatant Product Placement–It’s a Joke, But…

We’ve reached a new clever low in television. It’s called the product placement within the product placement joke. Tonight I was watching the highest rated comedy on GE-owned NBC, and the show started with a bit where Alec Baldwin was on a video being shown to the writers of a Friday night live comedy sketch show touting the benefits of product placement. How the writers should try to integrate GE products like their offshore oil rig drills into the sketches. The writers all scoff, and then comment among each other about how much they love Snapple. Baldwin too, gets into the Snapple praising. Then they continue with the show, all saying how they refuse to knuckle under to product placement AS THEY ARE PITCHING SNAPPLE!

Cut to a commercial…for…SNAPPLE! It seems that network TV is so desperate with the onslaught of YouTube, web ads and other media that they just go for it, unabashedly. I give them credit, the snapple stuff was funny, but sheesh, how blatant can they get?

The show before featured more of this…a ‘bonus’ segment of The Office where we see a guy making a salad out of a paper shredder. “Where did you get that,” he is asked. “Staples,” he replies. And we had just watched an ad touting the same product used to shred junk mail.

It all feels so desperate, so schlocky, so oh, never mind.