Product Placement in Films, TV and Video Games: Is it that Bad?

Most of the reviews I've seen for Transformers have been pretty good but there is one thing that many people are complaining about. It's not new to the movie business but it is becoming more prominent and seems to get on a lot of people's nerve. It is product placement.

Personally I don't get the big deal about product placement. Since everyone is talking about the product placement in Transformers let's use that movie as an example.

One of the biggest pieces of product placement in Transformers was none other than one of the Transformers themselves, Bumblebee. In the Transformers movie Bumblebee is a yellow Camaro. Many people are saying that this is blatant product placement and they are outraged. Are you kidding me? If Bumblebee can't turn into a Camaro, or some other brand of car then when it turns into a car what is he going to turn into? The whole point of the Transformers is that when they come to Earth they turn into Earth objects so they fit in. Turning into a brand of car that doesn't exist doesn't make any sense. I don't doubt that Camaro paid a lot of money to have their brand of car in the movie but Bumblebee had to turn into some kind of car, so what's the big deal?

In one review I read the reviewer said, "As the film begins in the headquarters of the Department of Defense, you cannot help but notice that everyone in the room was using HP computers. And when the computer analyst decides to steal secret data, there was a very tight shot on her slipping a mini-Panasonic SD memory card into her compact to take home with her." Actually I know for a fact that it isn't true that "you cannot help but notice" it because I didn't notice it. When I go to a movie I don't sit there and check every computer to see what kind it is and I don't even know what a mini-Panasonic SD memory card looks like. Here's another idea, maybe the reason they made a tight shot on the memory card is because without a tight shot you wouldn't see something as small as a memory card. Either this guy is just a huge computer geek or he's trying way to hard to find something wrong with this movie, or most likely it's both.