Product placement and branded contents...as troublesome as critics?

First of all, what is product placement and branded content? According to a business dictionary, it is an advertising technique used by companies to subtly promote their products through a non-traditional advertising technique, usually through appearances in film, television, or other media and often initiated through an agreement between a product manufacturer and the media company in which the media company receives economic benefit. Undeniably, there are a lot of successful product placements in movies. Below are two examples;

Windex, a trademark for a glass and hard surface cleaner manufactured since 1933 and popular in the United States and Canada since the mid-20th century was embedded in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

And a well known delivery service, FedEx, was placed in the movie Cast Away.

With the placements of their products in movies, story line of television shows, news programmes and other medias really bring great success to both product manufacturer and media company. Why? The product manufacturer is able to promote their products via a new way of advertising. We, as audiences, are not aware that while we were enjoying a movie or a simple story line television show, the product manufacturers are actually advertising themselves to us when we saw some branded contents in whatever we were watching. As for the media companies, they gain economic benefits from the agreement they had with the product manufacturers.

So, I do not think that there are any troubles caused by hypercommercialism to us. Companies are just making their own living out of it. It does no harm to us. We, as consumers, buy products that we think are beneficial to us. It has no concerns about huge companies embedding thousands of their products in movies, television or other means of media to brain wash us. We can take those ads as new knowledge for knowing there are such products that are available in stores.

Advertising has become a common thing in our daily lives. As it is becoming more and more prevalent, critics are also increasing proportionally. Kalle Lasn, one of the most outspoken critics of advertising on the international stage, considers advertising "the most prevalent and toxic of the mental pollutants". We are exposed to millions of advertisements daily. It is estimated 12 billion display ads, 3 million radio commercials and more than 200,000 television commercials are dumped to us without us knowing. Hanno Rauterberg (2008) stated in the German newspaper "Die Zeit" that advertising is a new king of dictatorship that cannot be escaped. It is true because, public spaces are turned into billboards and banners of products of all kinds. Even small products can have huge advertisements. So, it is obvious that we cannot run away from hypercommercialism. All we can do is just take it as it is and do not get too influenced by it.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/product-placement.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/windex
http://www.viralconversations.com/articles/product-placement-movies-00724/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising#Hyper-commercialism_and_the_commercial_tidal_wave