Over at Forbes, Adam Thierer ponders whether we could see a return to a model where companies sponsored entire shows or blocks of television, rather than networks selling ads to a bunch of different companies piecemeal throughout an hour or half-hour—especially in an era when consumers are increasingly fast-forwarding ads or skipping them entirely. While audiences certainly don’t like ads, whether becuase they break up storytelling or because they’re insipid, there’s no question that they’d probably like the alternatives to advertising support a lot less, whether that results in higher cable fees, higher iTunes purchase prices, or higher Netflix and Hulu subscriptions. Sponsorships could be less intrusive and could provide coherent framing to an episode of television, and could generate a great deal of good will for a brand if it’s seen to be keeping a show alive.

To a certain extent, Subway’s already done this with Chuck and with product placement in Community. And that brand’s work with NBC’s quirkier shows with more loyal fan bases raises an interesting question: how would such sponsorships work in a way that’s both good for programming and good for the companies that are buying in? Product placement can, of course, end up being more of a limitation than a help. It’s lovely to have a company provide cars for your characters, of course, but it can become awfully irksome if you want to tell a story about a car crash, and the company threatens to pull the cars if they’re shown crashing, crashed, or even if they’re stated to have crashed. An overly rigid approach to corporate and creative synergy can stifle storytelling and end up meaning we see less of the product on-screen.

Subway’s involvement in Chuck and Community, by contrast, always demonstrated an ability to be self-deprecating and a little obvious. On Community, the brand was willing to be the bad guy in aspiring small business owner Shirley’s fight to open up a sandwich shop in the Greendale Community College Cafeteria. The show didn’t have to disparage the sandwiches themselves, which were always implied to be a reasonable if corporate competitor, to use Subway as a specter of disappointment to a character. Similarly with Chuck, Subway’s presence was winking, a bit of placement that felt more like a compact between the company and the fans than two giant corporations.

If sponsorships become a popular model, I’m sure brands will be lining up to form affiliations with the biggest shows like Two and a Half Men and Two Broke Girls. But that’s actually missing the point. If companies want synergy and real, long-term relationships with the fan bases of shows, they need to shop around and pick programming that fits their sensibilities, and where getting what they want out of the relationship doesn’t cause harm to the show in the process. Buying a sponsorship is all about buying goodwill, and that means surprising an audience with the level or nature of your support for a show. It’s the rare situation where selling soap and making art could be well-aligned fo the companies that try to get sponsorship right.

In the wake of George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, Fox pulled some advertising for its upcoming comedy Neighborhood Watch, in which some overly-vigilant patrolees discover they’ve got an alien invasion on their hands. Now, they’ve changed the movie’s name to The Watch, and released a trailer that suggests the movie is more R-rated comedy than an affirmation of a power grab:

I tend to think movies like these are always somewhat dicey, since they’re built on the proposition that things that in the real world would be extremely dangerous or morally compromised—like getting overly zealous about guarding your neighborhood to the point that you start treating people in threats in ways that can escalate, or, say, torturing people—end up getting the results you want, whether it’s beating the bad guys or eliciting accurate information, both outcomes that in those cases would be rather unlikely. I thought it was problematic, for example, that in last week’s episode of Scandal, Olivia asks one of her employees to torture a suspect, aggravating what appears to be a severe case of PTSD, and then was rewarded for asking him to do this terrible thing by getting the information that she wanted. One bad message, that torture works, was wrapped inside a better one, that asking people on our side to do terrible things harms their humanity.

The Watch could end up validating macho nonsense that does real harm off-screen. Or it could end up arguing that most of the time, the people we assess as threats are no danger to us, and in fact are common allies in larger projects, the people we need to help make our communities better rather than the people we need to fear.

What would I do without Super Bowl ads to explain my own gender to me? Truly, I would be lost. Super Bowl 2012 actually seemed less egregiously sexist than previous years, even given the inevitable GoDaddy ad, so predictably gross that I don’t even include it here. But taken together, the ads form a pretty striking portrait of how American industry views American ladies. Let’s take a look, shall we?

1. Women don’t invent things (people of color don’t either), but they will sell you electronics:

2. When we’re superheroes, we get the cute little guns that can fit in a purse:

3. Seriously. Combat never stops us from looking hot:

4. That said, go up against a dude, and we’re super-defenseless:

5. You can make everything better by turning it into an unclothed woman who acts, quite literally, as an object for your use:

6. We live to seduce you so you will purchase motor vehicles:

7. Buy us flowers, and we will give you unreciprocated oral:

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For two Super Bowls in a row, Chrysler’s been the company to watch, first dropping gorgeous art-deco spot about the revitalization of Detroit starring Eminem and a gospel choir, and this year, rolling out Clint Eastwood for an ad that sounded as much like an Obama campaign message as a pitch for cars:

The team behind both ads is Wieden + Kennedy, based out of Portland, Oregon. And they have a strong track record of creating inspiring advertising with communal messaging that even if it’s not specifically progressive, feels resonant with progressive values. They’re the team behind the Go Forth campaign for Levi’s that used Walt Whitman’s poem to argue “we must march, my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger”:

And they did Coca-Cola’s “Hard Times” commercial, a recession-friendly spot that first stripped C. Montgomery Burns of his fortune and then brought him back into the Springfield community as a productive citizen who shared the rest of the town’s values (they also did this year’s Coke Polar Bear spots where fans of rival teams bond over Coke products):

Even their Velveeta ads employ a call to a return to traditional family values, leavening the stretch with a liberal dose of humor:

In other words, Wieden + Kennedy have a strong track record developing exactly the kind of messaging that the Obama administration will be looking for this fall. Even if the Eastwood spot wasn’t designed to give the incumbent a boost, the Obama re-elect campaign might consider looking West for ad help this fall.