Am I the only one who remembers the Saturday morning cartoons from the 80's that were thinly-disguised adds for plastic toys? Transformers and Go-Bots are the ones that come to mind, but I know there were more. Has anybody been stuck in a room with a TV playing Yu-Gi-Oh? It's a show about people playing the card game, although they have some obscure explanation for why the stuff is "really" happening to the characters playing it. Pokemon is another example, but I'm less sure about it because the show might have come before the toys. Somebody must think that kids who grew up on this garbage and didn't recognize it for what it was then won't recognize it when the toys being sold are more complicated.
Sadly, this is almost a necessary evil. The old way of paying for the production of the content with commercial breaks doesn't work so well because DVR's let people skip the commercials entirely. If we want low-cost television programming, we've got to pay for it somehow, and this is one way. The writers' guild clearly hates it, and I don't blame them, but the money has to come from somewhere. The only other option is premium programming like HBO, which not enough people pay for. I'm one of the ones who doesn't pay for it, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that product placement is rampant there too.
