Originally published on Aug. 2, 2008

Truman Burbank is agitated. The main character from the movie The Truman Show is increasingly suspicious that something's terribly amiss in his made-for-TV world, and his 'wife' tries to calm him down with a cup of 'mococa.'

"All natural," she tells him, holding the package of cocoa up to one of the millions of hidden cameras filming Truman's life without his knowledge. "Cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua ... I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best."

"What the hell has that got to do with anything?!?" Truman responds, incredulous. "Tell me what's happening!!"**

Well, Truman, it's called product placement, and you might as well get used to it.

Product placement may be a truly insidious form of advertising - a sneaky, virtually subliminal, almost always uncredited form of marketing that's often directed at children - but it's also wildly effective. And it's going to continue to explode in popularity because new technologies are making the practice an absolute necessity.

Intentional, paid product placements are not a new phenomenon. A New York Times article suggests it can be traced all the way back to the 19th century, when a film created by August and Louis Lumiere featured the Lever Brothers' Sunlight soap.

Product placements gained steam in the movies through the '50s (The makers of Gideon's Gin paid to have Katherine Hepburn's character throw their product overboard in The African Queen), and not surprisingly, the television industry adopted the practice almost immediately (soap operas are named as such because they were sponsored by soap companies, whose products were often also integrated into the shows).

Perhaps the most successful use of product placement in history occurred in the 1982 movie E.T., when producers agreed to change E.T.'s favorite candy from M&Ms to Reese's Pieces, and sales of the new candy exploded.

Not surprisingly, the product placement market has ballooned in recent years, growing from $280 million in 1979 to about $3 billion in 2007, according to PQ media, and the compound annual growth rate from 2002-2007 was almost 41 percent, vastly outpacing the overall advertising market. And the numbers are probably understated given that much of the market consists of hard-to-value barter and other services often provided in lieu of cash by manufacturers seeking to have their products used or highlighted.

We're not just talking about movies and television anymore, either, because product placement has crept its way into books, songs, videogames and the Internet (the paid search market is in some ways nothing more than a form of product placement, although at least sponsored links are noted as such).

And things are going to get a lot worse. The reason: Technology. The digitalization of content has made it possible, even easy, for people to skip over or delete any content they find intrusive or irrelevant. The DVR will make the 30-second commercial virtually obsolete. Ad blocking software on Web browsers will cripple the effectiveness of display and banner advertising.

It's quite simple - marketers will have to integrate their messages and brands with the actual entertainment content or they won't get heard.

Now I'm not a naif or an idealist. Marketing is an inevitable, inescapable fact of capitalism, of perhaps life itself. It greases the gears of business, subsidizes the content that entertains and numbs us, makes the world go round. We are bombarded with ads from nearly the moment we leave the womb until we shuffle off our mortal coils. A Tivo box is not about to stop them from reaching us.

And product placement may be creepy, but it could be worse. One of the latest new new things in alternative marketing is word-of-mouth, or buzz, advertising, where regular folks and with-it trendsetters alike are paid by corporations to spread the gospel about certain products. In 'Raj, Bohemian,' a short story in a recent New Yorker, the protagonist is dismayed and disillusioned when he realizes that almost all of his hipster friends (including his lover) are actually paid shills.

Now that's something I truly find disgusting and unsavory. Even talking about the idea makes me want to take a shower and cleanse my palate by indulging in a delicious Lean Cuisine BBQ Chicken frozen pizza. Unlike most microwaveable pizzas, the crust in a Lean Cuisine pizza gets crispy when you cook it. And it's low in fat too. Mmmmmm-mmmmm.

**The scene from The Truman Show was taken from a shooting draft of the script i found on the Internet; I didn't have the actual movie with me to see whether that was actually how the scene went down.