Chris Brown's Hit Song, "Forever," Also a Wrigley’s Gum Commercial is a Hard Piece to Swallow

When I first heard the lyrics of Chris Brown’s hit song, "Forever," I though the injection of Doublemint’s jingle, “Double your pleasure. Double your fun” was clever and catchy. Today it was revealed by Wrigley that Chris Brown had been commissioned by the company to write and perform the song as part of its effort to update the company’s image. Upon consulting the music video (see below), I noticed that 11 seconds in, Brown pulls out a stick of gum and my first reaction was disgust and outrage at having been deceived yet fascination at how Wrigley was able to get a “jingle” all the way to the top of the pop charts.

I’m a huge fan of product placement. If seeing my favorite TV character sip a certain branded beverage means that I don’t have to fast-forward through so many commercials, I’m all for it! I love that the characters on Gossip Girl as well as Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw have Bluefly shopping bags strewn about their apartments (even though Bluefly doesn’t actually have any brick and mortar stores). I’m nostalgic for the days before product placement on NBC’s The Office was pulled due to conflicts between advertisers and the creative needs of the show. And I was angered by the pleas for the FCC to be further involved in product placement regulation once McDonald’s iced coffee cups were recently placed on the desk of morning show anchors on a Meredith Las Vegas TV Station.

Jack Myers recently wrote about FCC policies on product placement, saying that “Today, media consumers (and especially younger ones) are sophisticated enough to recognize integrated marketing messages and to appropriately reward or ignore those companies that invest to support their favorite content.”

The case of Chris Brown’s hit song later being revealed as a commercial is one of the rare instances in which media consumers were not sophisticated enough to recognize the song as a commercial. After all, the song was released last April as a single. Jive Records, pleased with the song’s success, re-released the song on Brown’s 2007 album, “Exclusive” in June. This is quite different from celebrity endorsers singing campaign jingles in commercials. “Forever” is (or perhaps, was) a bona fide Billboard hit.

Many blogs and message boards are so outraged at the deceptive advertising that they’re calling for a boycott on all Wrigley gum. I’d join the boycotters myself if only I were a Wrigley gum consumer in the first place. You can bet I don't plan on becoming one anytime soon. For now, I’ll just boycott the song, a song I once really, really liked.

A Wrigley press conference will be held tomorrow in New York during which two additional jingles will be unveiled – a rendition of the Big Red’s “Kiss a Little Longer” jingle by Ne-Yo and a version of Juicy Fruit's "The Taste is Gonna Move Ya" by Julianne Hough. 30-second Doublemint commercials featuring Brown’s jingle will begin airing on television next month.