Product Placement

I’ve been living out of the hotel for almost a week, and the check-in clerk gave me my favored room right near the gym area. This afternoon I made my routine visit, but without my laptop, having just finished watching the first season of The Wire and not being ready to start afresh on the next one. Instead, I turned on the TV built into the treadmill and plugged in my headphones.

After scanning through the 12 available channels and finding absolutely nothing of interest, I resigned myself to ESPN2, where the post-race analysis for the NASCAR Brickyard 400 (500?) was filling the spare airwaves. I was only up for a 1.5-mile run anyway, so I figured I could suffer through about 12 minutes of anything.

The interviewers were scurrying around the inside of the track hunting down quick interviews with every driver they could find. It only took me two of these silly repartees to notice something odd, however: the drivers are all drinking cola beverages. Gratuitously so. By the third driver, I found myself laughing out loud when the guy stopped awkwardly mid-sentence and took a long, slow, tiny sip of his Selected Beverage. It was so funny, because he just clearly didn’t want to take a big swig of coke after what must have been a grueling afternoon in a hot race car. (By the way, they burn about 230 calories an hour!)

Between that and the tedious insertion of the names of all the other sponsors (“Yeah, our tires were giving us some trouble, but I really have to hand it to Goodyear and the Dupont team…”, “It was just great to be able to go out here with Home Depot and Glidden and really tear it up…”, etc.), I found myself really enjoying seeing how much and how hard these guys clearly have to work to make sure they’re pushing their Brands. Next time you see the round-n-rounds on TV, stick around for the post-game show. You’ll love it.