Hypercommercialism - Do you find product placement and branded content as troublesome as do its critics?

Hypercommercialism is defined as the excessive use of mercantilism in media to obtain success and profit (Wiktionary, 2008). Product placement is a form of advertisement, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, the story line of television shows, or news programs and often not disclosed at the time that the good or service is featured (Sourcewatch encyclopedia, 2009).

Product placement is the latest trend in advertising to make it less advertorial. It is a tendency to move away from in-your-face ads and usually hovering in the background of mini-movies or quasi-documentary vignettes that feature real-life scenarios.

Good examples are from

1. Gossip Girl – an American teen drama television series based on the book series of the same name, written by Cecily von Ziegesar. The series revolved around the lives of privileged teenagers attending an elite private school in New York City’s Upper East Side. Since this series revolved around the lives of privileged teenagers, of course, there’s got to be brand names everywhere.

Exhibit A:

Leighton Meester, one of the main cast of Gossip Girl is wearing an outfit designed by Victoria Beckham, a famous singer and designer.

Exhibit B:

Notice the Louis Vuitton bag.

2. Korean movies and dramas - South Korean popular culture has increased in popularity around the world and even considered as the filter to the western especially American culture as they maintain Asian values and themes. If you haven't notice, South Korean movies and dramas most of them only used Korean products in the background of the movies/dramas. Example of products are LG and Samsung (cellphones), Hyundai cars, etc.

Samsung brand phones used in television drama, Boys Over Flowers (Korean)

For me, I dont referred product placement and branded content as troublesome. Its just another way for brand names to commercialized their products. Hypercommercialism has been a common thing now in music, movie industry and so on and we somehow got used to it. Product placement may most of the time attract our attention and we eventually found ourselves (like myself) googling through the net or browsing through shops and shopping malls to find what attracted us on the first place but its our own choice to make the decision to buy certain product or not. But i think most of the time, when we watched movie in the cinema, we doesn't really bother about the act of product placement because i think they come and go off our heads. :)

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hypercommercialism
http://money.howstuffworks.com/product-placement.htmhttp://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Product_placement