(2 of 2)
You can glimpse the future now. Product placement in movies is an obvious instance of where advertising has slipped outside its traditional container into entertainment. MTV--an entertainment medium designed expressly to sell records--is another classic example. Every time a rapper mentions a brand of anything in a song, advertising slips into art. If you have a Harley-Davidson tattoo, you're there already. If you wear a T shirt with a logo on it, you're also there but with less pain. Eventually, every surface that can display a message will be appropriated for advertising.
A backlash is inevitable. Perhaps people will pay a premium to live in "advertising-free zones," just as, perhaps, they will be willing to pay a premium to live in cell phone-free zones.
The Internet will accelerate the phenomenon. The browser page and the LCD screen on your cell phone or your PalmPilot are still contested territories, allowing new relationships among the different kinds of content that appear there. The Pampers website provides parenting information and advice--and, presumably, not the kind that the Pampers people wouldn't want you to see. In a less obvious kind of relationship, marketing execs can enter chat rooms under assumed names and praise their company's product, service or stock: that's just advertising masquerading as conversation. And more directly, consumers are excited about an emerging technology that allows them to click and buy as they consume journalism or entertainment--say, to buy Frasier's couch as they watch the show. That's not entertainment with advertising: that's entertainment as advertising.
People get very nervous when they see the line blurring between advertising and other forms of content; they think advertising is some kind of infection that pollutes the purity of art, ruins the objectivity of editorial and distracts from the pleasure of entertainment. As usual, however, people are nervous about the wrong thing. Consumers are smart and perfectly aware when they're being sold; surely parents who go to the Pampers site are happy to find worthwhile information there and are capable of distinguishing between a commercial message and an editorial one. Art and journalism, until they became pretentious in the late 20th century, always relied on direct subsidy from private sources. Don't think for a minute that commercial interests didn't enter into it.
The only genuinely disturbing aspect of the ubiquity of advertising--the real reason to get nervous--is that it has begun to supplant what was formerly civic and public. There's no Candlestick Park anymore, just 3Com Park, and now there's a PacBell Park to match. The venerable Boston Garden was replaced not too long ago by the Fleet Center: a city erased, its role played by a bank. A little town in the Pacific Northwest just renamed itself after a dotcom company in return for a generous donation. I won't mention the name here, since I figure advertising should be paid for. That's when advertising has gone too far: when it's become something we are, rather than something we see.
Jay Chiat cofounded Chiat/Day, which created ads for Nike and Apple ("1984"), among others. He now heads ScreamingMedia, Inc.