I’m not a huge music video aficionado, but Mr C tends to point out those that catch his eye whenever he spots them. Recently, a new video from Kelly Clarkson emerged, for her single People Like Us, and it’s worth a look… for the wrong reasons. There’s an odd story about saving a colourful child from a world of black and white, but that’s not what I saw.

I’m fully aware that product placement is part of how these things get funded, and I’m totally okay with that - if it is done with a bit of subtlety and/or restraint.

What we don’t need is a Nokia phone being pulled out of a pocket, and a full two second shot of it pausing, so you can see what it is. Does anyone actually do that? It’s luminous yellow in a black and white world already, I think it stands out well enough.

And there’s not one, not two, but three close up images of the BMW logo on that car, just in case you couldn’t quite figure out what make it was.

I can’t see that anyone is going to buy a BMW because they saw it in a music video, but it’s part of the overall brand awareness thing that really does work. However, these two examples are so blatant and patronising that it just makes me want to boycott the companies on principal. Not that I could afford a BMW anyway.