That was so forced and stupid my brother and I still quote it. It was so completely tone deaf that it pretty much cemented Ford as a company that is completely out of touch.

As time goes on, the product placement bit from Wayne's World gets more and more topical.

If the cool hero uses a motorcycle to escape the evil henchmen I don't care much wether money was involved in selecting the brand of motorcycle. If he then spends a minute of screen time lecturing about the benefits of said brand, it should be considered a new category far beyond product placement.

Anyway, I only bring this up because, while I agree with you in principle, I think that in the right context, exaggerated product placements can be as palatable as subtle ones.

(Later on, when the show was being considered for cancellation, a massive fan campaign had hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans getting themselves some footlongs to eat during the season finale and mailing the receipts to NBC, thus saving the show for three more seasons).

If they're using a Samsung, eh who cares. My brother has the same phone, I can relate to that.

I am actually quite torn about those disclaimers: once people have officially committed to product placement, any remaining internal unwillingness to compromise writing for placement revenue will break down completely.

The opposite is just as worse by the way: our public broadcasting networks here in Germany are producing some rather popular fiction, and they have started to implement draconian rules to fight product placement (after some sizable scandals where the money went to their contractors or employees instead of going to the nominally nonprofit networks themselves). The result is that any time something like social media comes up in, say, a cop show, they have to make up a new fantasy brand to represent Facebook, Twitter or Google. This severely hampers their ability to talk about the modern world. Imagine for example what would be left of The Godfather if you replaced all references to the "brands" of Catholicism (and Christianity in general) or Italy with generic placeholders. You might as well move it from America to the Shire entirely.

The influence of product placement is there now matter how you spin it. In House of Cards (US), the worst influence might not be in who paid but in who did not: iirc Twitter seems to be pretty much embargoed in the show, even though they are using it for promotion quite a lot.

"'House of Cards' littered with product placements | New York Post" - http://nypost.com/2015/03/02/house-of-cards-littered-with-pr...

Monument Valley. Although according to both parties no money changed hands. The producer simply liked the look of game, called up the developers, asked if they could use it and the developers said "sure".