I can think of a lot of plastic bottled drinking water that invalidates this.
Of course the other problem is getting it in the channel. People who also sell Pepsi/Coke will probably be discouraged from giving away your product. You could target places like hospitals, parks, events, etc...
In any case, I'd love to see the companies who can do this.
If I wasn't running out of server space faster than I could buy new servers already, I'd have bought a bunch of those for the last opensourceworld tradeshow.
Adwords itself is an example of how some companies are willing to pay tens of dollars per 'click' for advertising. Branded dirt won't usually work, but it might at a nursery tradeshow.
But yeah, nothing but 'free content' is going to work if you are spamming the masses with your advertising. But, I believe that many content creators are willing to create content to advertise themselves. Especially in the technical world, writing has almost no hope of paying the same as technical work, but people still do it.
I suspect the problem will not be that nobody is willing to write content for free, but that we need a new way of vetting the good, credible content from the bad.
What makes content difficult to sell is that there is a business model around giving it away. This is due to one large reason: the cost of distribution of content on the internet approaches zero.
Now at this point pg may say, "exactly, because you were selling the paper before". No, not exactly, you were selling the content and the cost of distribution (which is a different thing). It's why I can't give away water with advertising on it. The cost of physically distributing it will eat into any profits I make on the advertising.
When you look at it from this position you see that nothing has really changed from the pre-internet days. You simply have the cost of production/distribution of a product versus its selling price + indirect revenue (advertising and such).