Perhaps you’ve heard of the TLC show, Jon and Kate Plus 8?  If not, perhaps I could come and live with you – your life sounds lovely.

Jon and Kate Plus 8 is a reality show, based on a family with two sets of mutliples – sextuplets and twins.  Mimi is obsessed with this show and can’t understand why I don’t want to sit with her and watch an entire Saturday marathon of episodes (hint: it has something to do with all the screaming, crying and whining).  I can take it in small doses though (the kids are kinda cute), so the other morning we were watching and suddenly Jon says he has a little work to do before he can go outside with the kids.  They show him going over to the computer and pulling up the website for Allstate Insurance.  Throughout this sequence, his voiceover is saying something about how his Allstate Agent wanted him to check some things out on the website.  The Allstate website.  Where you can get all kinds of helpful information about Allstate insurance for times when you need insurance for some stuff.  Allstate.

I was laughing to myself about what a lame attempt at product placement that was when Mimi says, “Hey, mom, do we have an Allstate agent?”  I’m glad she spoke up because I would have let the moment pass without pointing out how products are imbedded into programming all the time.  We had a little discussion about whether Jon really needed to “do some work,” or if he was just trying to call attention to a company that is likely paying money to get him to do so.  We came up with a few other more obvious instances (judges drink Coke on American Idol) and she decided it’s a fun game – sniffing out the product placement.

For now she’s looking mostly at visual images – we didn’t get into how entire scripts are written around products, because cynisism is unbecoming in a seven-year-old.