The hidden-in-plain-view marketing strategy of product placement has recently grown beyond the insertion of commodity objects into film and television. It now appears in a variety of popular media including video games, comics, music and books. This proliferation is occurring alongside a shift in how these products are being embedded. One example involves an evolution from the more typical product-used-as-movie-prop strategy into the full-swallow integration of products or brands into the story line (see "Wilson" the volleyball in the movie "Cast Away"). This insinuation of commercial interests forces writers to alter the narrative, compromising the creative task of cultural production (and not without protest from groups like the Writers Guild of America). In some cases, marketers are actually replacing these content providers.

This super-saturation of commercial content in cultural media has lead to a conflicted constellation of discourse that includes a debate between the people and the advertisers. The arguments on behalf of the people rely on the viewer's (lack of) awareness, or put another way, the product's contextual invisibility. The assumption is that product placement is a hidden exploitation of the viewers attention and expectations of veracity. A consumer protection group called Commercial Alert calls it "...an affront to basic honesty. Product placements are inherently deceptive, because many people do not realize that they are, in fact, advertisements." Attached to this argument is the theory that if the consumer is not aware of the presence of the product, and if it's invisible to them as a viewer, they are in danger of being manipulated. Research has suggested that some advertisers have been successful at connecting products to latent desires (in addition to offering solutions to problems or responding to existing needs). In this sense, product placement is like a veiled seduction.

Another perspective argues that because our environment is already saturated with an accumulation of images and objects that carry intellectual property protection, whether copyright or trademark, it has become increasingly difficult to represent the world around us in a way that speaks honestly about contemporary experience or takes advantage of our shared cultural/visual lexicon without including these products. This argument is most typically used by artists or film makers in opposition to conservative copyright laws which restrict their freedom to include these everyday commercial objects and images in their work. In the case of documentary films, these placements are often accidental - a byproduct of filming in the public sphere for example. As individuals, these omnipresent quotidian product appearances are as invisible to us as singing happy birthday or wearing a brand-name t-shirt.

While one argument may be said to be conservative (preserving ad-free media) and the other liberal (progressive open access), both arguments are opposing corporate hegemony and therefore approximate a shared resistance - yet the specific tension between the two is worth noting. A generalized account of the two points reads: the artists want freedom of usage and re-presentation while the advocacy groups want to filter output in an effort to stop the public from being duped. In other words, the tension exists on a spectrum between anything goes and tightly controlled, and both may be in our best interests.