In less than three weeks, the White House Easter Egg Roll—an American tradition dating back to 1878—will, for the first time, begin selling sponsorship spots.

For $200,000, your brand can lock down 900 square feet of activation space, slap its logo across signage on the South Lawn, and score four tickets to an invite-only brunch with the First Lady. For a mere $75,000, you can notch just 100 square feet of brand exposure—and still get a handshake from the Easter Bunny.

When I wrote the below story in 2023, I was struck by how brazenly brands were on display in Emily in Paris, one of—if not the—most popular shows on TV. The more I read and the more I spoke with people in the space, the clearer it became: brands face few roadblocks when it comes to invading the zeitgeist and showing up in the places we turn to for escape. Meanwhile, entertainment—TV, movies, you name it—has become increasingly open to tossing a brand into the mix, seemingly unaware of how much it might dilute the final product.

This year’s Easter Egg Roll is hardly the first time brands have cozied up to government through pay-to-play or quid pro quo arrangements; just last month, the South Lawn of the White House became a Tesla showroom. Maybe Senator Cory Booker’s come-down from a 25-hour speech on the Senate floor could’ve been enhanced by a Liquid I.V. Cotton Candy Hydration Multiplier, a morning escape to a SweatHouz or an all-inclusive getaway on a Carnival Cruise Line?

The lines have blurred, and they’ll continue to get fuzzier. Whether it’s a 22-minute sitcom or a presidential press bit, it’s all part of the same machine: advertisers buying narrative space, and us learning to love—or rather, being force-fed—the taste of it.

— Colin

The third season of Emily in Paris debuted late last year, and the show’s stunning premise—What if a twentysomething studied abroad but, like, forever?—has made it essential viewing for those looking for a respite in these stormy times.

A quick synopsis of the show: Emily, a girl boss who made 2010s hustle culture her personality, moves to Paris to work with a French marketing agency. For better or worse, each episode feels like it could be the next or the last: Emily suggests an idea for a brand, executives dismiss it but eventually love it, Emily falls in or out of love with someone, the credits roll, and the next episode plays.

“It is best to think of the entire exercise of Emily in Paris as a sort of collective hallucination that we are all having together,” Vulture’s Jessica M. Goldstein wrote at the beginning of the new season. Completely agreed.

About four minutes into the season’s first episode, that hallucination becomes apparent. Emily gets a call from her Chicago-based ex (for what it’s worth, we haven’t heard from him since season one), but he’s not here to waste time rekindling a lost love. It’s business, baby!

The gist: Emily, I work for McDonald’s now. And guess what? They’re looking for a French marketing firm to market the drumroll, please McBaguette. Wait—was it you who told me that you work for a French marketing firm? Woah! I’ll set up a time for you to seal the deal with my boss. By the way, he’ll be in Paris in 14 hours.

The McBaguette—it’s funny! (For more on corporate breading, see: Panera’s BAGuette.) Even for the fever dream that is Emily in Paris, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that this could very well be a gag, a tongue-in-cheek dig at, I don’t know, Americans having shitty taste in food, Americans having a shitty grasp of other languages, American corporations co-opting foreign culture with a washed-down, scalable shitty version of it, et al.

It’s gotta be something like that, right?

Right?

RIGHT?

Minutes later in this McDonald’s marathon, one of Emily’s many love interests suggests they both head to grab lunch at drumroll, but like you already know what’s coming:

Fast-forward to the end of the episode (it doesn’t matter what happens), and Emily is finally sitting down to dinner on top of the (you guessed it) Eiffel Tower. The Boss of the Associate Manager of Global Partnerships at McDonald’s turns out to be easily impressed and, well, this entire pitch Emily put together? He’s lovin’ it.

Some other nonsense rounds out the episode (someone’s water breaks—it doesn’t matter whose, OKAY?!), and the episode comes to an end just before the next begins.

As I briefly come out of this binging fugue state, it hits me: nearly everything in this entire episode has been a whole series of product placements and integrations for a marketing activation!

My hunch, confirmed by The Drum, left me feeling more upset and stupid than usual after watching hours of TV. How could they? I wonder. How could Netflix, the company whose content I, on the whole, generally think is OK and whose content I’ve never sat through a commercial for, and furthermore, have never paid for—oh, OK, I think I get it.

“When ratings drop, ad rates drop, too, and when people fast-forward producers look for new forms of access: through apps, through data mining, through deals that shape the shows we see, both visibly and invisibly,” wrote The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum in 2015. “Some of this involves the ancient art of product integration, by which sponsors buy the right to be part of the story: these are the ads that can’t be fast-forwarded.”