30 Rock Too Good at Product Integration?

Is strategic and increasingly funny product placement hurting the media? New York Magazine has an article as insightful as Honey Nut Cheerios is delicious.

Now visionary auteurs could make the kind of art that no one thought TV could handle in the first place. Mad Men, The Wire, 30 Rock …

And yet, even as this era was dawning, something else had been going
on… there was
no longer any logical way of making any [money]… The economic structure that had for so long supported
television… was dissolving in
the heat of the new technologies...

Enter
product integration, branded entertainment, and the new age of
television economics.

The article places blame on the television writers for being so damned good at making it work. Like in 30 Rock, when Liz Lemon plugged Verizon and promptly looked into the camera, exclaiming, "Can we have our money now?"

But the question lingers, can you hold onto integrity and sell a product? Charlie Rosen, co-founder of Amalgam, an ad firm responsible for product integration, supplies us with an answer maybe he didn't intend.

If you’re really
an artist, go fucking paint a picture or write a book or do something
that’s fully about art.

Way to respect the people you are working with, guy. Good job.

The bottom line is, low-rated shows like 30 Rock, and Arrested Development (which integrated Burger King into an episode) need to hawk something stale in order to produce something fresh. Even though personally I'm above peddling tripe as if it were a delicious Wendy's Baconator burger, like I've said many times before, I'm willing to swallow if that's what it takes.

[via Gawker]

After the jump, I bring you one instance where product placement arguably made a bit ten times better.

When I think of Colbert's classic bid for the presidency, it's hard to imagine it without the undercutting jab of product integration. Connecting a presidential campaign to corporate shilling, is at once hilarious and subversive. Stephen Colbert wins the prize of being awesome and that prize is a Peabody.