One more and I’ll stop for the day, I promise. I was sipping some Starbucks Italian Roast from my Thermos travel mug when I read this article in The New York Times about product placement in fiction aimed at girls aged 8 and up. I feel like I should find this trend more disturbing than I do, but it seems more like a formalization of something that’s always been around anyways.
Of course, if an author radically reframes his or her narrative – undermining a critical plot twist or sidestepping a central theme, say — to get a mention of a specific brand into it, that’s bad. And if the story itself is just a crappy vehicle to squeeze advertisers, I suspect that the audience in question is smart enough to spot that and opt out of something that doesn’t offer any entertainment value.
I guess I just assume that kids are smart enough to know when they’re being sold to, which is pretty much constantly, so I consequently assume that they can make value judgments on what the proper ratio of content to pitch is.