On NPR’s Morning Edition this Wednesday, reporter Elizabeth Blair took a hard look at the ways in which advertisers are flooding our media and having more and more of a say in the content we see between the commercial breaks. New tools and technology have given consumers more options for skipping the ads that have quietly come to fill as much as 10 to 15 minutes of a half-hour program. With TiVo and online streaming, people can increasingly choose what commercials they see — or skip the ads altogether.

The result? We’re getting a lot more products pushed at us inside the actual shows. Product placement is nothing new, but the extent to which this practice has expanded, and the lengths to which some producers will go to when pushing new products is troubling. As advertisers begin to dictate content in television shows, and even launch their own TV channels, it becomes increasingly clear that in much of commercial media the advertisers are the networks’ clients and we are the products being bought and sold.

We’ve all seen sitcoms where everyone seems to be drinking Coke, or action shows where it seems everyone in the city happens to drive GM cars. This practice is so commonplace Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin skewered it in this clip from 30 Rock:

However, Blair’s NPR report looked at how embedded advertising is actually reshaping TV programming. Networks are creating entire shows to push certain brands. On My Yard Goes Disney, writes NPR’s Linda Holmes, “Disney theme park designers visit civilian back yards to make them over. [There's] this ratcheting up of in-show advertising to the point where the show itself announces that it is all about taking your normal existence and branding it as ... if you lived at a for-profit theme park.”

Last year Free Press was involved in fighting a similar show, Nickelodeon’s Zevo-3, which consisted entirely of characters from Skechers shoe ads. Working with the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, we called on the FCC to block the show, which constituted a half-hour advertisement targeting children. So far the FCC has not responded. Here at Free Press we’ve also shown how this embedded advertising is making its way into TV news.  

Blair’s NPR story revealed a new marketing brainchild that goes way beyond one show. The Hub is a new cable channel “born of a collaboration between Discovery Communications and Hasbro” and features “a significant number of shows that happen to be about Hasbro toys.”

What the NPR story didn’t get into is what we can do about this practice. In 2008, the FCC requested feedback on requiring better disclaimers for embedded advertising.  Since then many people have weighed in to support stronger rules, but so far the FCC has not acted.  Free Press filed comments and signed on to a letter in 2009 asking FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski to address the problem. This week’s NPR story illustrates that as the FCC has delayed action, the problem has only gotten worse.