Product Placement - A gimmick or a strategy played well?

It was supposed to be a brilliant theater play - interesting title,good location, fantastic actors and a team of renowned director and producer. And two title sponsors.It was supposed to be.

Having products appear in a program—product placement—has been a part of the TV business since the early days of the medium.. However,for now, it looks like a lot of marketing theories are passing through an adolescent period. Since viewers can now tune out of commercial breaks, marketeers are trying new ways to keep themselves in the viewer's gaze. Sometimes the attempts are way too desperate. Check the below video by Kanan Gill and Biswas. where they hilariously point the product placement in the movie 'Abra ka Dabra'. Check the video from 3:05 to 4:13 specifically.

However sometimes, some brands do add a story line. One good example of the same was set by the reality show RauPaul's Drag Race which embedded Absolute Vodka and Las Vegas Convention & Visitor Authority pretty convincingly.

“The integrations allow us to advertise things in a way that’s sort of a soft sell. We do it in a way that’s clever, that doesn’t really offend the intelligence of the viewer. We have fun with it in a way that we know what we’re doing, they know what we’re doing—and we make it an adventure", RauPaul said. 

Remember the Oscar Selfie? It wasn't as unplanned an act as it looked prima facie.

The act was smartly planned by Samsung, one of the Oscar's biggest broadcast host.The picture got more than 3 million Retweets and at a point, received 900 mentions per minute on Twitter.

Even though the lines between entertainment and advertising continue to blur, overly promotional strategy can actually turn of consumers. Just because there is an audience doesn't necessarily mean they would like to consume sponsor's information in everything they read, hear or see. The forte is to create a content that seamlessly embeds in the story-line and is worth sharing. Despite storytelling being a rage, not everyone is great at it. A part of this art it to know when to stop.

I'd like to share this assessment from Sam Slaughter at Contently:

“So if the most clichéd of media pronouncements is in fact true and content is truly king, then nascent and unchecked content marketing risks being labeled the joker, endlessly performing the same knock-knock gags and cat listicles to the general opprobrium of the court while beautifully crafted yet ineffective banner ad campaigns remain the coin of the realm …Thanks to increasing product placement rage,one of its central problems is that the term “content” is so ill-defined that anyone with a keyword generator and seventh-grade English can claim to be a content creator without challenge.”

I'd love to know your thoughts on this.