Product Placement, Commercials, and The Wire: Radio Show Idea

I know it’s a bit early in the week, okay really early to be making any statements like I understand how audio works, but I’m already sitting on an idea that might be able to turn into a cool thing for the radio show, so I thought, why not type it out?

It stemmed from this exchange of Tweets:

This eventually got me thinking about all the other product placement and references in the series. Product placement in general in television can be ridiculous, poorly executed, and distracting.

Project Runway is one of my guilty pleasures and that show is SO full of product placement these days its crazy. One minute they’re designing clothes for the week’s assignment and in the next shot they’re discussing how cool some refrigerator is.

White Collar is notoriously bad for their Ford product placements. Look how much screen time is given to the car parallel parking for the character:

Anyways, I digress. This got me thinking about all the products or brands that have appeared in The Wire:

  • McNuggets
  • KFC
  • digital camera/ Kodak Moment reference
  • NFL video game

I’m sure there are plenty more, but those are just the ones I thought about off the top of my head.

Since we have to riff on The Wire in some way, wouldn’t it be fun to turn a lot of those product placement moments or turn innocuous phrases or conversations into commercials for some product?

I listen to pop radio stations when I’m driving on the interstate and their commercial breaks kills me. The sounds and cheesy lines are so bad. Also, Richmond stations are really into advertising hookah bars and sex toy shops, which makes the commercials even more interesting as they attempt to be polite about it.

So maybe for this radio show, the show could be all commercials that we’ve made out of clips from The Wire. For instance, end the McNugget conversation from season one with the McDonald’s jingle.

I think it would really speak to rampant product placement in television these days as well as be a good way to make fun of some of the stuff said in The Wire that could easily be manipulated to become the audio for a silly commercial.