Last night I went to see S.W.A.T. at my neighbourhood multiplex. Within the first 10 minutes of the film, we were exposed to extreme macro beauty shots of a Dr. Pepper can and a 20-foot McDonald’s bag.

Suddenly, the ceiling of the theatre opened up and the angel of death swept down to seize another piece of advertising roadkill from the cluttered highway of so-called brilliant marketing ideas. The audience was relieved and we carried on with S.W.A.T, an epic piece of filmmaking on the scale of Ben Hur meets Invasion of the Monster Trucks.

Now, let me declare my conflict right here. I love advertising. I like the art of product placement. The very thought of negotiating a prominent position for a product, name or service in the uncluttered environment of a feature film or television show is not only brilliant but also ground-breaking. However, the practitioners of this art have become sloppy and greedy, and their captive audience is on the edge of their seats poised and ready to revolt.

It’s not unlike what has happened to screen advertising. In 1985, I was the sole voice that argued in the pages of Marketing Magazine that the public would accept screen advertising if the creative was innovative and clever and not a blatant commercial sell. How unusual, creative being creative. Sure enough the negativity dissipated as the quality of the commercials improved and the exhibitor enforced one golden rule: the creative must be produced exclusively for the screen without any prior broadcast on TV.

But similar to what’s happening to product placement, the exhibitors and the advertisers got fat and lazy. There are no rules anymore. The cost has come down and so has the creativity. You are now forced to sit through ear-splitting shampoo or car commercials that are bad video-to-film transfers and lack any kind of connection to the world of film.

Some of these ads are so badly written and cast they can only reflect a client and ad agency that believe that by simply programming it on screen it’s a slam-dunk.

Wrong.

As the theatres get wired for digital screenings, you can prepare yourself for a slew of bad spots resulting from the elimination of the costly film processing and printing process. I predict that frustrated audiences will force exhibitors to start marketing their screens as commercial-free. A sad day in advertising as the medium of film is so damn exciting.

But let’s go back to screen advertising’s richer and older cousin, product placement.

Although product placement has been the subject of splashy stories on Entertainment Tonight and featured as a monumental business story in magazines and newspapers, its origins date back to the mid-’50s. When James Dean swept an Ace comb though his silken hair in Rebel Without A Cause in 1955, sales went through the roof for the small company in Booneville, Ark.

From there the product placement business was fast and furious. Consider Tom Cruise’s Ray-Bans in Risky Business (1983), the Junior Mints in Seinfeld (1996) and the Olympic marathon of product placement in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) featuring BMW, Avis, Smirnoff, Omega, Ericsson, Heineken and L’Oréal.

Last year was a boffo year for product placement: Spider-Man had NBC, Kellogg, Hershey and United Airlines, American Idol had Coke, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding had Windex.

But the gold medal went to Minority Report. Since Reese’s Pieces’ candy cameos 20 years earlier in E.T., Steven Spielberg has kicked product placement up in a big way with talking billboards actually pitching Tom Cruise’s character a record 15 brands, including American Express, Gap, Nokia, Lexus, Burger King, Guinness and Italian jeweller Bvlgari. The approach and execution were tremendously creative.

The players in this fast-paced industry have been around for a long time. In the U.S., Sun Valley, Calif.-based NMA (Norm Marshall & Associates) has been the godfather figure since 1979, pioneering deals such as USA Today in Runaway Bride and Minority Report, and Tahitian Pearls on Friends.

In Canada, Toronto’s MMI Product Placement has led the industry since 1985. In fact, I was one of MMI’s first clients, as its young founder Phil Hart supplied Pringle chips and Bailey’s Irish Cream to a young producer making a film. The practice has become a steady component in the marketing mix and a very high-profile way to attach a celebrity to a product and also launch something new. As was the case with BMW’s Z-3 in Goldeneye in 1995.

Product placement has also evolved to include virtual placement in televised sporting events and regular dramatic and comedy programming.

And, at the other end of the spectrum from virtual billboards and blimps, remember TV’s Texaco Theatre where advertisers owned the show and had a free-for-all in product placement?

TV commercial veteran Michael Schwartz (Avion Films) hopes that history will repeat itself. Using a proven recipe of two parts product placement and one part content, he’s producing a cooking show, Felice & Friends, with the help of MMI Product Placement, for a time-slot Schwartz bought from CTV.

All fine and dandy. But, in product placement, voracious greed is outweighing style and subtlety and the practice is clearly heading for a free-fall on the scale of an overexposed diva ultimately driven to perform at a Holiday Inn on Route 66.

Our dear paying public will never have an issue with James Bond driving a BMW or Tom Cruise wearing Ray-Bans as the sun has to shine and 007 isn’t going to take a taxi. But the cash grab of product placement has collided with art and the script is now dictating dialogue like, ‘Hey Joe – have a Dr. Pepper’ or direction that has the camera lovingly panning a FEDEX truck over and over.

It is downright distracting, insulting and you can hear the scream of marketing hara-kiri in the not-so-distant future. Marketers and film studios had better wake up to the fact that people are going to stick their heads out of the window and start yelling, ‘I’m not going to take it anymore,’ and stay away from theatres in droves.

The blending of art and commerce demands a subtle hand. Hitting the audience over the head with a hammer tends to render them unconscious and unable to remember the product.

Is the business of product placement salvageable? Of course. Is it really a valuable ingredient in the marketing mix? Yes. It requires creative minds and execs who will be happy measuring success in product sales, not by the length and size of exposure on the screen. But there is nothing quite like the taste of fame, and convincing advertisers that it’s better for a product to play a supporting role rather than insist on a star turn is highly unlikely.

Barry Avrich is president of Toronto’s Echo Advertising, author of Selling the Sizzle and a filmmaker happy to get a free BMW lease in exchange for exposure in his next film.