Emily Nussbaum has a very good story in New York magazine about product integration (which Neda Ulaby also discussed recently in a great Morning Edition piece you must hear, though you will have the word "organic" ruined for you forever). While I don't agree with everything Nussbaum has to say, she admirably presents both sides of the basic debate over how pure artists can expect to keep their art when they are, after all, trying to get people to pay for it.

The 30 Rock problem and the irrelevant Oreo, after the jump...

 

The focus of the article is 30 Rock, which has found various creative ways to pull off its product integration so blatantly that it becomes another joke in a show that's full of them. It's fascinating to see just how betrayed Nussbaum — and some of those she interviews — felt when they realized that there was an additional incident where the product integration on the show (for a product called SoyJoy) was not blatant. Instead, it was so seamless that they didn't notice it and assumed the product was fictional.

Blatant product integration, good; product integration you don't notice, bad. I'm not disagreeing, but it's an interesting equation.

What I found most interesting about the piece are the discussions with actors and other creative types who run the gamut from being extremely offended at the thought of product integration in general to extremely offended at the thought of television showrunners thinking they're above commerce. In between lie the reluctant realists: 30 Rock actor Judah Friedlander acknowledging that he's in no position to refuse; star producer Joss Whedon, who might have a character mention a phone but probably not rave about it; J.J. Abrams, who didn't mind building a Ford into Alias, but was embarrassed at having characters call out its name.

It's not surprising that the problem is bottom-lined by Joe Davola, a producer of the soapy drama One Tree Hill, not a show known for its artistic integrity but one that has capitalized enormously on product integration. Davola puts it to the easily offended this way: "If your show is struggling, and it wasn't one of the top-twenty shows, and this would keep it on the air, what would you do?"