That's advertainment: desperate to grab viewers' attention, advertisers are increasingly blurring the line between entertainment and commercials.

• Author: Majerol, Veronica
• Position: MEDIA

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the music video for her hit song "Telephone," Lady Gaga checks for missed calls on her Virgin Mobile phone and smears Miracle Whip salad dressing onto sandwiches.

In an episode of 90210, Dixon and Annie pack a coolerful of Dr Pepper for their road trip to Arizona and vow to drink nothing else during spring break.

In the online-gaming world, Sims 3 players can take the Renault Twizy electric concept car for a spin around their virtual neighborhood.

And in the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney faithfully stays at Hilton Hotels and flies only on American Airlines.

None of this embedded advertising happened by accident. The makers of each of these products worked hard to secure their on-screen appearances. And these kinds of product placements are becoming a lot more common as advertisers look for new ways to get their messages across to consumers.

For years, food, car, and electronics companies have offered, and often paid, to have their products included as props in TV shows and movies. But in recent years, as DVRs have made it easier to skip traditional 30-second ads, advertisers have sought new ways to pitch their brands, including paying producers to script them into TV shows, as well as movies, videos, and video games.

"We want to blur the lines between the commercial breaks and the entertainment content," says Dario Spina, who handles "integrated marketing" for Comedy Central, Spike, and MTV's other entertainment channels.

But some watchdog groups are concerned about the explosive growth of what is sometimes called "advertainment."

"Typically, when people view a commercial that they know is a commercial, they employ a veil of skepticism," says Corie Wright at Free Press, a nonprofit organization that works to educate consumers about media. But "product placement tends to shape viewers' preferences even [when] the viewer isn't aware they've seen a commercial"

News Shows

Of particular concern for Wright is the growth of product placements on news shows, which raises the possibility of conflicts of interest when the shows cover stories associated with any of their sponsors.

Wright wants the F.C.C. (Federal Communications Commission) to make its product disclosure rules more strict--currently, advertisers and media companies can disclose product placements in small type in the show's end credits--and to extend the rule to include cable television, not just network TV.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In a way, the current wave of product placements is a return to the roots of television and, before that, radio marketing. In TV's early days in the 1950s, soap, tobacco, and oil companies wedged themselves into the very titles of the shows they produced--like the Colgate Comedy Hour and the Texaco Star Theater. (Singing gas-station attendants opened the Texaco show each week with a jingle: "We're the merry Texaco-men, tonight we may be showmen, tomorrow we'll be servicing your cars.")

But rising production...