Last season on Heroes, my favorite show, one of the characters received a Nissan Rogue for her birthday. She really liked her Nissan Rogue.

Then
her Nissan Rogue was stolen. And her father was very upset that she
didn't take better care of her Nissan Rogue. This subplot, which had
absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the show, was about as
exciting as watching paint dry. On a Nissan Rogue.

In fact, the
theft of the Nissan Rogue wasn't really a subplot at all – it was an ad
in disguise. Nissan paid to get its Nissan Rogue in the show. Nissan
might call this product placement or "embedded advertising." I call it
a huge bore. If I wanted to find out more about the Nissan Rogue, I
could go to a website about the Nissan Rogue.

Now the government is looking into regulating these "stealth ads,"
and it's about time. At a time when television viewers are both more
able and more likely to fast-forward through traditional commercials,
product placement isn't a bad business model. But viewers need to know
the difference between shows that are trying to entertain them with
stories about the Nissan Rogue and shows that are trying to sell them
on the benefits of the Nissan Rogue.

One has to wonder whether anyone old enough to drive a Nissan Rogue is naïve enough to believe that a character on Heroes drives
a Nissan Rogue because it makes sense for her to drive a Nissan Rogue
rather than because the show's creators were paid to include a mention
of the Nissan Rogue. But networks need to come clean, anyway.

Right now, the FCC requires that product placements be identified as
such during a show, but this is usually done very quickly during the
credits. Networks need to identify ads while they're appearing, by
running a crawl across the bottom of the screen that marks them as
such. If viewers can't fast-forward through ads for products like the
Nissan Rogue, as they do now, they should at least be able to ignore
them, as they've been doing for years.

Naturally, networks are
complaining that running such announcements in the crawl will interfere
with the flow of programming. An American Advertising Federation
executive told USA Today that it would be "terribly disruptive." But would it be any more annoying than my constant mentions of the Nissan Rogue?