What do you do when it’s time for a TV commercial break?

If you’re like me, you check your e-mail, brush your teeth, grab a cookie, throw some laundry in the drier, pay some bills—anything but watch the darn thing. And of course, though I’m too technophobic to learn how to use it, TiVo (DVR) has rapidly changed the landscape by allowing people to painlessly zap commercials altogether. This week’s New York magazine article by Emily Nussbaum did a great job of breaking down the new ways in which advertisers are getting their products showcased on television, using as the main focus the NBC comedy 30 Rock. One of the more common strategies advertisers now use is to have its product as a central plot theme. 30 Rock—a TV show about putting on a TV show—lampoons this process, while 30 Rock itself is part of this trend. This phenomenon, known as brand integration, isn’t new (who can forget the Junior Mint or Pez episodes in Seinfeld?), but with technology having made it easier and easier to avoid commercials (or the PBS equivalent, “sponsor breaks”), it’s likely we’re going to see more and more of this kind of thing in the future. One of the scarier examples cited in the New York article was the recent Broadway revival of Sweet Charity, which obtained permission from Neil Simon to substitute a product name (no, I’m not going to name it here) in the line “I’ll have a double Scotch on the rocks.”

Still, entertainment and the arts are incredibly expensive to produce, whether it’s an orchestra concert, television show, opera, or Broadway show. read more