Oh boy, I have bad news.
Product placement is not a literal advertisement shoehorned into an otherwise unrelated media.
YouTube does not have the authority to dictate what content creators include in their video, nor do they charge them for content they promote. The way in which YouTube generates revenue is through ads and subscriptions. Other streaming services do the same; the only difference is semantics.
I’ll refrain from further arguments as the last hasn’t been touch on: product placement is not persistent sponsorships or advertising. We only see this on YouTube as they do not pay creators a fair amount of the cut, and thus creators need to augment their yt income. We don’t see any James Bond/007 movies where he has a flat tire and breaks the fourth wall to ask the viewer if they have AA service, as ‘it is very useful and quite affordable’ with a 20% discount voucher for opening weekend viewers, shown at the bottom of the screen. ‘that’s theaa.com, and tell them James sent you’ before cutting to the next scene where the Aston is arriving at the hotel on a flatbed.
Merely driving the Aston without the AA bit, as a form of product placement, isn’t exactly advertising in the same sense. There is realism and there is peddling out of necessity.
