The creation of a kind of promotional "gray market" has spawned its own product brokers: Band Ad Media and HP Media, a pair of Los Angeles firms that act as go-betweens for advertisers and entertainment companies, have been meeting lately with several labels to discuss matching artists with products.
Some in the industry believe it's just a matter of time before the music video turns into a powerful sales tool not only for musicians but for almost anything they might drive, play, wear, eat or blow up in a clip.
"MTV's going to have to rethink what videos are and what content is," said Lance Jensen, creative director at Modernista, a Boston-based advertising agency that handles the Hummers.
"A video is a commercial. Here's Levi's, here's my Sprint phone and here's my Adidas. So what? It's going to happen."
That sort of "blatant commercialism," MTV's Calderone insists, isn't appropriate for the Viacom Inc.-owned cable channel. "It's a music video, not an advertising vehicle. That's why there are commercials."
But Mark Humphrey, Band Ad's operator, said the 11% drop in album sales last year is forcing labels to hook up with advertisers or forgo music videos altogether. The track record at MTV, he said, suggests that labels can slip in commercial tie-ins that are clear enough to satisfy advertisers while avoiding detection .
"If we're smart enough with our production design, we can slide by them left and right," Humphrey said. "It's like drugs across the border."
Humphrey, a former sales executive at a video production firm, said labels also can sidestep MTV restrictions by placing an artist's song in a TV commercial for a particular product and then replicating the ad's feel in a music video, though without showing the product. The goal: to build an association in the viewer's mind.
Credit card firm American Express Co., for example, cut a deal to use singer Sheryl Crow's single "Soak Up the Sun" in a TV spot -- and to help pay the cost of the single's video, Humphrey said.
American Express contributed about one-third of the $900,000 spent shooting the video in Hawaii, then used some of the footage for its own ad, Humphrey said. No American Express cards appeared in the video.
The rise of ad-supported music promotions comes as tensions between some labels and the music-video channel simmer because the balance of power between the two has shifted.
