Lexus Tries Product Placement in Fiction - Running in Its Own Magazine

A couple of days ago, the Washington Post ran a story on product placement in entertainment. For those who don't know, that means inserting product brand references in books, movies, video games, television shows, and other places that advertisers hope will influence the buying product.

Oh, please. Advertisers are hyperventilating and reaching for the nearest paper bag because their ads don’t’ work anywhere near as well as they once did. It has to be the medium or audience “desensitization.” It couldn’t be because they are too greedy for attention, ready to crowd out anything that really interests people. It couldn't be that usually the products are poorly designed and built so that people just aren't interested or that the companies have saturated their markets. It couldn’t be that companies have so often come across as lying sacks of excrement that consumers have figured out that burying DVDs of advertisements in the garden makes plants grow.

So what’s the answer? Lie some more and pretend that references in entertainment just happen to be there. So what if the companies become directly or indirectly the subject of stories in the largest media outlets? So what if the efforts turn into PR messages that they are manipulative swine who compound the problem by having their own ad sensibilities injected into entertainment. Really, “In fact the car’s more like a super-powered laptop on wheels than anything else?” That doesn’t even rank as good brochure copy. Is the solution to their marketing problems to associate their corporate brand with lame drivel? And it’s in their flipping custom-published magazine! Do they think that isn’t getting their name into the hands of the people who already own one of the damned cars?? Are they afraid that readers don’t see the name of the magazine on every page? Is this a tacit admission that here’s one marketing vehicle that can’t pull its own weight? Oh, hold on, I’ve got the answer – let’s sponsor an event. Let’s buy the naming rights to a sports arena!