Have you aver been watching a TV show, which then cuts to a commercial, and that commercial features something related to the scene you were just watching? Think of this thread as sort of like the “sequential threads” thread, but for TV shows and commercials.
Last night Welcome to Flatch featured the classic sitcom trope of a pregnant woman going into labor at an inopportune time. Right after she went into labor it cut to a commercial which showed a woman carrying an infant. It almost felt like it could have been the next scene in the show.
This might be more than coincidence- it may be actual product placement. SNL’s season opener had a dumb sketch featuring the Charmin bears, with an actual Charmin commercial immediately following.
I can’t think of a specific example, but I’ve noticed it multiple times during this year’s Christmas T.V. movies. I just assumed that the moviemakers had arranged for tie-ins with the advertisers.
Until this year, one of the sitcoms on ABC was Black-ish, in which the father of the family worked for an advertising/marketing agency and sometimes was portrayed working on campaigns for real companies. I remember seeing the episode cut to commercial for the same companies.
In the early days of SNL, John Belushi did a one-man sketch satirizing the US Army’s “Be All That You Can Be” recruiting drive. This was immediately followed by a real “Be All That You Can Be” commercial. At first it was impossible to tell them apart.
There was the infamous example of when “The Holocaust” miniseries aired on television, when one scene showed an S.S. officer complaining about the reek of burnt flesh from the crematoriums. Cut to a commercial for oven cleaner that promised to eliminate odors.
When Mad magazine first started allowing advertising in the late 90s iirc it was almost entirely for kids products, some of which I thought were actual Mad magazine fake products like Green Ketchup and edible slime, they were so absurd.
I mentioned an odd juxtaposition of this nature in another thread-- a couple years ago the Today Show was talking about the 25th anniversary of the Alanis Morrisette album Jagged Little Pill, and showed a clip of the ‘Ironic’ video, which featured Alanis driving a car with 3 clones of her clowning around in the back and passenger seats.
Then they immediately went to a Buick commercial featuring a woman driving a Buick SUV with 3 other versions of herself in the vehicle. The tagline was something like “Buick: for all of you” (it still plays constantly).
Not in TV, but in Playbills: The program book for The Book of Mormon generally have an ad for the Church, with the line, “You saw the musical. Now read the book.”