Commodification in TV

In class last week we talked about commodification in the media. It was defined as the blending of advertisements within programming. Some of the examples we used were The Truman Show and popular brands of soda used in reality shows. The first thing that came to my mind was the television show American Idol. The blatantly obvious commododification in the show is the Coca-Cola use. The judges are all shown drinking out of Coke glasses, and there are multiple commercials for the soda brand throughout the duration of the show. This is similar to what we discussed in class and not that out of the ordinary for most reality TV shows. I think that if you watch more of the show, you can see that American Idol crosses the line of simple advertising and begins to shove products down your throat.
The finalists of American Idol always do group songs together during the show, and sometimes they create actual music videos for viewers to watch. This would be completely harmless if the music video was not sponsored by Ford. Due to the fact that American Idol has corporate sponsorship the music videos that they show morph into a three minute commercial with some catchy pop song with one goal in mind: to make you buy a Ford. It is one thing for a television show to have commercial breaks, but when the products are being thrown at you throughout the entirety of the episode it gets a bit ridiculous. I think American Idol takes commodification to another, way more annoying level. I hope that media does not continue on this downward spiral into consumerism and focuses more on the actual substances of television shows.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB0VUAJyFM0