“Fresh off yesterday’s post on the rise of product placements on reality shows comes some hard-to-believe news from Adrants about a new online reality show in France... “Priest Academy!” Yeah, you guessed it, tender innocent souls duking it out for ratings and redemption. Wish I could tell you this was a joke, but apparently not...”

    Product placements in television programming have come under scrutiny in Europe this past year - especially in the UK, where they’re currently banned - but regulators here in the US have largely avoided the subject for years. Until this past week. A piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reveals that the FCC is poised to reassess how programs and advertisers disclose paid placements in broadcast shows. To give you an idea of the kind of saturation product placement is reaching, viewers of the most recent season of The Biggest Loser were bombarded with five paid placements a minute - 3,997 in all over 16 episodes. Plenty more over at my Huffington Post blog...

    The Whopper has been whooped! After recent gags in which customers were told the Whopper was discontinued, now comes news that the King’s flagship sandwich is again the butt of the joke. Only available in the UK, the $200 boutique burger - roughly 100 times the cost of a regular burger - features Wagyu beef (AKA Kobe beef), white truffles, Modena balsamic vinegar, “onion tempura prepared in Cristal champagne” and “Italy's finest Pata Negra prosciutto.” Oh, right, and pink Himalayan rock salt (naturally). And what do they wind up calling this culinary delight...

    I suppose it was inevitable. Corporations have been sponsoring people to turn their cars into moving billboards for years, but it was always more or less a niche trend. With the recent rise in gas prices, it looks like the concept is attracting more interest. According to this piece on CNN.com, Jobing.com only found three execs among its ranks willing to turn their cars into mobile ads back in 2001, when the program was introduced. Today, that number is closer to 160 - or 60% of the company’s staff. “You’d be a fool not to take advantage of it,” says one employee. Indeed...

    Catharsis! No respectable branding blog could ignore the news today: Apple’s long-awaited 3G iPhone is rumor no more. No, I’m not in line... at least, not right this minute... but I will be picking up one of these little branded bundles of goodness in the next couple months. I won’t be alone, of course. In fact, Apple is projected to sell 12 million iPhones this year - a middling number compared to how many the company could move next year. According to projections from Piper Jafray analyst Gene Munster, Apple will sell 45 million iPhones in 2009. By comparison, the Motorola RAZR, the world’s last super phone, took two years to sell that many units...

    I plugged in at a local studio here in Santa Fe for a remote session on The Kojo Nnamdi Show this past Thursday. Kojo was MIA, but his guest host, Matthew Felling, did a great job moderating the show with Rohit Bhargava and me. Bhargava’s a sharp guy - works in marketing with Ogilvy and has a book out right now called Personality Not Included. Bhargava is in favor of companies tapping into their “personalities” to better market goods, build relationships, etc, - and the man knows his stuff. Not sure if the producers had intended to put us in a mason jar and shake, but, as it turned out, no branding Thunderdome in sight...

    The irony was inherent: In order to publish a book about Obsessive Branding Disorder, I would inevitably have to engage in a bit of branding myself. And indeed, even before the writing was done, the publicity effort had begun. Months from the launch of the book, agents, publishers, and publicists were already networking, brokering introductions, and currying favor in the media. Mock-ups of the jacket began filling my inbox, awaiting my feedback and approval...