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Beijing. A corporate intrigue television serial hit the screens in China last month, fighting for eyeballs in the country’s ultra-competitive entertainment market. But unlike its rivals, this 30-episode drama was written around just one silky star — an anti-dandruff shampoo brand named Clear.

In scene after scene — be it a battle of wits between office rivals, a bitter betrayal or a romantic rendezvous — the camera somehow managed to include Clear’s product or posters.

The relentless, some say shameless, product placement in Unbeatable 2 may turn off viewers in other countries, but the Chinese audience can be quite tolerant. The series is a hit, with more than 100 million online hits in two weeks.

No surprise then that China’s so-called embedded advertising industry is expanding at up to 40 per cent over last year’s estimated $10 million.

It is still a paltry sum compared with the United States’ $3.6 billion of product placement revenues across all media platforms, including reality shows and Internet games. But there is no doubt that China is the new darling of advertisers.

"Audiences in the West may not accept a show that has brand posters and commercials plastered in the backdrop of every scene," said brand consultant Jerry Li from Beijing agency AdNew. "But in China, people are willing to put up with it as long as they like the plot and star actors."

Unbeatable 2’s prequel, which also aggressively plugged the shampoo, was just as popular, attracting 447 million TV viewers. Within the first month of the broadcast, Clear’s market share rose 24 per cent from a year ago, when its share was reportedly less than 10 per cent.

Both followed a winning formula - star actors, slick production and avoiding blatant product placement by using more sophisticated ways to weave the brand into the plot.

It worked so well that its advertisement agency won a bronze award at this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival.

On the big screen, product placements have become the bankers of movie producers. "Feng Xiaogang’s film World Without Thieves covered its entire cost of production with earnings from product placements," said Wuhan University communications professor Liao Bingyi, referring to the famed Chinese director.

The commercial success of Feng’s films, particularly his blockbuster If You Are The One and its sequel, which featured more than 35 brands, have earned him the nickname ‘advertisement king’.

Even propaganda films milk the advertising yuan. The Founding Of A Party, an epic celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, shows Chairman Mao Zedong receiving a gold Omega watch from his girlfriend - an artistic license taken by the film-maker rather than a historical fact.

Co-director Han Sanping insisted that this was just a "detail of our prop design" and should not count as product placement.

In the past year, Chinese brands have taken their product placements to Hollywood. Transformers: Dark Of The Moon carried Lenovo laptops, TCL electronics, Metersbonwe apparel and dairy giant Yili’s Shuhua milk.

The film’s massive box office takings in China - some 600 million yuan (S$117 million) - were proof of money well spent by the Chinese firms. Industry players say Yili may have splurged up to US$10 million to get its milk in the film and launch a related promotional campaign.

But even the usually quiescent Chinese viewers can be turned off by the aggressiveness of some brands.

Netizens here slammed a scene in the Transformers movie, for instance, when a wacky scientist slurped his milk and said: "I am not talking to you until I finish my low-lactose Shuhua milk."

In March, the Chinese authorities said they would look into regulating product placements. This was in response to growing complaints about blatant placements, such as Chinese blockbuster Aftershock’s insensitive plug of banking and insurance services in scenes depicting grieving victims of the Tangshan earthquake in 1976.

Still, the industry has already made quite a lot of progress since the early days when most product placements would make the audience gag, said Renmin University professor Wang Fei.

"With more regulations and voices from the public telling the media what they want, this industry will have even better-quality growth."

Reprinted courtesy of Straits Times Indonesia. To subscribe to Straits Times Indonesia and/or the Jakarta Globe call 021 2553 5055.