Advertising as an Inverse Signal
ABC and MindShare (part of WPP) link up on product-placement, claiming it will be "seamless and organic".
I have my doubts - I think this is exactly the kind of 'innovation' (read: common sense) that the stagnant and creatively bankrupt advertising industry has needed, well, forever - but I'm sure they'll make it as egregious and obvious as possible. Just so they're sure they can measure our 'awareness' of their products.
Now what would be interesting is to see what kind of recombinative innovation would result from using emerging technologies in advertising. Japan's got a lot of that. But WPP's efforts in that arena have failed miserably, because they don't like geeks - they like marketing droids, who are disconnected from the Matrix.
Note to ad industry: at last count, I was aware of 6,382,982,093 different products. But the ones I bought were the ones that were
advertised the least. Now there's a theory: advertising as an inverse signal of future benefits.