Television Increasingly Covered With Brands

At some point, it becomes all clutter. We have to be really careful.

-Laura Caraccioli-Davis, executive vice president and entertainment director for Starcom USA.

She was referring to the growth of "branded entertainment" programming. The activity is booming and includes integration of products into program plots as well as crawls at the bottom of screens and even (on the Bravo cable network) L-shaped bars that cover the bottom and side of the TV screen with commercial messages. Participants at an industry meeting on branded entertainment did not express a sense of when viewers would begin to rebel against this in-your-face commercialism. Caraccioli-Davis noted that cable networks seem to do more deals. "They are more apt to shill their shows," she said. "Maybe cable networks are not all that protective of [their programs]."

In Wayne Friedman, "Branded Entertainment Offers TV Ad Bonanza, MediaPost's Media Daily News, April 28, 2008.