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.

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.

American Petroleum Institute ad campaign

In recent weeks, they have flooded television programs with television ads promoting the causes of the industry. The American Petroleum Institute (API) calls itself “the only national trade association that represents all aspects of America’s oil and natural gas industry.” With money from its more than 400 corporate members, the group has been running spots like “Vote 4 Energy,” trying to convert angry consumers into civic allies.

In the 30-second spot, a series of unidentified people claim that they vote and support key oil industry priorities.

I vote. I vote. I vote for American jobs. I vote. I vote for more domestic energy — energy from all sources, to get America working again. I vote. I vote. I vote for energy security that will come from developing our own energy resources. Like oil and natural gas. Right here. Right now. I vote. To re-energize America with American energy. Learn more at VoteforEnergy.org.

Watch the ad:

Other spots in the series take aim at “new energy taxes” and cheer oil imports from Canada.

As Greenpeace reported in December, the “voters” were fed lines by the media production company and the carefully scripted spots were far more astroturf than grassroots.

Companies like Chevron are also running ads on their own. It is running a series of similar feel-good sports highlighting the company’s support for small business and its work helping the economy of the oil-exporting nation of Angola.”

The ads of course, make no mention of the myriad environmental and safety risks of deregulated offshore drilling, hydrofracking, and tar sands pipelines.

But, in putting the industry on the side of voter participation, if nothing else Big Oil has created American jobs — for television ad-makers.

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:

8. Because really, we’re more into yogurt than having sex:

9. Although we do dream of being rescued:

10. Which is maybe something we should work on, since it looks like none of us will survive the apocalypse:

11. Old ladies, though? Totally badass.

12. Even though they need insurance companies to help them make decisions:

13. Also, ladies are good at selling real estate:

14. And not acting like morons at parties:

15. Props to Budweiser for recognizing that ladies a) drink beer, b) like sports just as much as men:

16. Especially since the NFL seems to think we don’t play fantasy football:

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.