With writers facing tough ethical choices in a world of blurring editorial and advertorial content, media professionals presented a variety of viewpoints on product placement at a magazine and advertising session Thursday morning.

“The product placement industry was a $2.4 million business in 2005,” said Barbara S. Reed, associate professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Seventy-five percent of those billions went for deliverables, or product integration.”

The deliverables, Reed said, were extra promotional items supplied to television shows as a regular part of doing business – whether it’s Snickers bars or automobiles.

For example on the HBO show, “The Sopranos,” Reed said Tony Soprano’s wife, Carmella, was interested in having a $90,000 Porsche. In exchange for the car, HBO agreed to have Soprano writers include praise about Porsches in the show’s script, she said.

Reed also said the “church and state” divide between writers and advertisers is dissolving in other media forms, too, such as magazines and comic books.

Likewise, AEJMC panel and audience members attending “Product Placement: Good or Evil?” expressed concern about the changes.

Patrick M. Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America, West, said that programs are being told by networks. “You’ve got to work in the product, or we don’t get the money,” he said.

He also said shows designed to be cheap ¬– in particular, reality television shows – cheat writers out of benefits such as health insurance and pensions.

As a consumer, Kartik Pashupati, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University and session participant, said, “You can avoid advertising, but you can’t avoid product placement and … branding, because it’s not an intrusion.”

Frank Zazza, CEO of ITVX, a prominent firm aiming to seamlessly embed product branding into shows, shared a different perspective.

“He who has the gold makes the rules,” Zazza said.

The bottom line is that writers need to capitalize on the opportunities that product integration holds, Zazza said. He added that he was the one responsible for the infamous connection between E.T. and Reese’s Pieces.

Zazza also said his company devised a computer program that regularly monitors the quality of product placements, so advertisers only pay networks based on how seamlessly the product is integrated.

He said it’s a paid-on-performance model that helps networks and advertisers “do business better.”

Advertisers are opening branded entertainment divisions all over the place, Zazza said.

But this is the primary problem, according to Washington and Lee University’s Edward Wasserman.

Wasserman, a Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics, said commercialization is taking hold of communication.

He said his concern about product placement includes consumers being deceived, content creators relinquishing creativity and hidden agendas in programming.