Kudos to a reader of The Consumerist for finding this little gem, which I couldn't help but repost. We've all been exposed to plenty of greenscreened advertising over the last few years, even if you don't always know it; it's been a common practice to digitally replace local business stadium advertisements in baseball and the like with nationwide advertisements when the games are rebroadcast on television. But you might be interested to know of a weirder form of digital alteration: reruns of popular television shows that have been re-branded with advertisements for upcoming movies. No one's really sure how widespread the practice is yet, but take a look at this still from a 2007 episode of How I Met Your Mother, then take a look at the same scene as rebroadcast recently:
Wait a minute, how could an advertisement for an upcoming shitty movie be in a 2007 episode of...ohhhhhh. That's fucking sneaky, and probably all the worse for it seeming to want to be subtle about it. I doubt anyone's going to consciously see this and think "Wow, I've got to go see Zookeeper!", but it's one more pebble in the pile of sand that is a media campaign. What's really weird is that someone actually thought this up and paid for it; the film is from Columbia, but the show is broadcast on CBS and produced by 20th Century Fox, so there's no obvious business reasons for this to happen.
