On any given day, David Newton reads two or three film scripts. Each week, at least 20 land on his desk. And the Toronto executive, whose warehouse office is in the heart of Toronto's film district, goes through them all, line by line, on the lookout for those sure-fire scripts that will custom-fit his clients and make them shine.

So it was going one balmy day in the spring of 2000. Newton's secretary buzzed him to say that two young producers were in the lobby, eager to pitch a movie with a weird name, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Newton ushered them in, took the package they offered, and promised to get back to them in a few weeks.

It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

Newton's business, Premier Entertainment, has nothing to do with casting, producing, or managing beautiful people. He's a product-placement guy -- one of Canada's savviest -- and My Big Fat Greek Wedding was, it turned out, a gift from God.

The producers had come to Newton hoping to get permission from a manufacturer to show its Ouzo brand in their independent film. (Greece's national drink gets high billing in the romantic comedy.) He did that and more.

As the 39-year-old Newton read the screenplay by Winnipeg's Nia Vardalos, a grin spread across his face.

In the movie, the bride's Greek father, Gus Portokalos, uses Windex as a panacea for everything from warts, poison ivy, psoriasis and a bald head.

Windex -- as luck would have it -- is made by one of Newton's top customers, S.C. Johnson & Son. Newton gave permission for the cleaners' brand to be used, and asked the production team to crank up Windex's profile a bit on the screen. When the film hit the cinemas last spring, there was Pater Portokalos wielding the familiar spray jug with dour abandon. It appears in at least a dozen shots and is mentioned four times.

A little over one month ago, My Big Fat Greek Wedding became the highest-grossing independent film of all time, breaking the record previously set by The Blair Witch Project.

"You can't put a dollar figure on that kind of product exposure," says Newton happily. "It's a 108-minute commercial for our client."

Over the years, we've watched products neatly slip into films and TV: Steven Spielberg's lovable alien E.T. munched on Reese's Pieces (chocolate sales soared). Comedian Jerry Seinfeld genuinely loved Snapple so he kept it stocked for Kramer, Elaine and George in his apartment.

But product placement is now a recognized industry, rather than a back corner of the advertising world, and everyone wants a shot at it. The game is reaching new levels of sophistication and products are turning up in more and more unexpected places. Never has the relationship between commerce and creative content been so incestuous.

In the product-placement world, companies don't necessarily pay to have a product placed in a film or TV show. Sometimes the producer pays, sometimes the marketer does, but more often, it's a case of bartering. As Eric Dahlquist, president of the Entertainment Resources and Marketing Association in Burbank, Calif., explains it, "If Will & Grace needs to build a gym for two scenes, why spend hundreds of thousands to build it? If they go to Crunch Gym and they build it, it works for both parties."

We got used to Tom Cruise's Oakley shades in Minority Report. We laughed at the blatant FedEx banner stamped across Cast Away and Tom Hanks's relationship in that movie with a Wilson basketball. We snickered when Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) lurched about his Starbacks-swathed stronghold in The Spy Who Shagged Me.

But even jaded consumers may have done a double take when producer/director Baz Luhrmann announced a few weeks ago that the set of his latest musical extravaganza on Broadway, La Bohème, would incorporate two ads. Opening Dec. 8 at New York's Broadway Theatre, Luhrmann's production of Puccini's 1830s opera sets the story in Paris's Latin Quarter, circa 1957. The set includes two billboards, one for luxury pen-maker Montblanc and the other for Piper-Heidsieck champagne. Some die-hard theatregoers gasped. Others just shrugged.

"Six years ago, when I was starting Premier Entertainment, people used to say to me, 'Isn't that illegal to put Coke in Minority Report? Are you allowed to do that?' " remembers Newton. "It floored me that the market needed so much education to understand what we were doing. The awareness of product placement has dramatically increased. The market is embracing it. It's becoming a very contagious medium."

The trend doesn't stop with the stage and movies, though. A new video game from Electronic Arts, The Sims Online, has teamed up with McDonald's and Intel. Its players can dine on virtual Quarter Pounders, work on PCs with the computer giant's logo, and when they've accumulated enough dough, even open their own McDonald's chain.

And pop music is obviously fertile ground. Rappers, for example, have always loaded their songs with ghetto-fabulous references to luxury brands. Rapper Ludacris now sings about the Cadillac Escalade, a sport-utility vehicle, in his ditty, Southern Hospitality. The lyrics go: "Cadillac grills, Cadillac mills; Check out the oil my Cadillac spills." Busta Rhyme has been chanting, "We gon' tell that brotha, pass the Courvoisier," while Ja Rule, Jay-Z, and Canadian rap star Choclair have sung the praises of Burberry, Cristal champagne and Microsoft's X Box. So far, the publicity has been free, but it was reported recently that hip-hop record company Island Def Jam is working with a product-placement company on deals that would charge brands for song placements.

But mere one-stop product placement is apparently not enough. A few months ago, Revlon paid several million to become an integral part of the story line in ABC's TV soap, All My Children. For three months, the cosmetics giant played the corporate thorn in the side of another makeup-maker, Enchantment, owned by Susan Lucci's character, Erica Kane.

Diehard fans of the 32-year-old show were glued as Revlon plotted to steal key members of Enchantment's staff. Meanwhile, the resourceful Ms. Kane caught a whiff of Revlon's plans and placed her own daughter, Bianca, inside her archrival as a makeup mole.

ABC insisted the show's writer came up with the plot twist before the product placement was hatched.

Johnson & Johnson has started making its own family-friendly movies on the Turner Network. The first one featured William H. Macy. The next one, Burt Reynolds and Mary Tyler Moore. The strategy, some say, is sound because it ensures J&J's products get cast as well.

Not everyone, though, is jumping up and down. Some critics have complained about the encroachment of product placement and say sometimes it's difficult to tell who is driving the content of some shows, the marketers or the producers.

The reality-TV shows are often cited as the most fervent product-placers. In Fox's 12-week reality-TV series American Idol: The Search for a Superstar, the products of co-sponsors Ford and Coca-Cola often seemed to get more coverage that the wannabe popstars. The judges drank Coke, a Ford Focus chauffeured some of the contestants around, and there was a Coca-Cola Red Room for interviews, decorated with bright red couches. And there were prerecorded segments called Coca-Cola Moments.

Dahlquist says a good product placement should be like a good waiter or a good referee -- "something you don't really notice.

"There is a perception out there that product placement is going to be a replacement for traditional advertising," says Dahlquist. "I don't believe it. It's not the same approach. One is an editorial approach, and the other is a sales approach. We need both. Product placement doesn't work in all cases. And if the product or image you're trying to get recognized, is out of place in the story line and it jars the viewer, then they'll click off. People don't want to drown in brand."

If that's true, it will be interesting to see how audiences take to the new James Bond film, Die Another Day, which hits theatres in less than three weeks. The iconic Bond -- a bulletproof brand -- has signed 20 companies and their products.

According to Variety magazine, Ford paid $35-million (U.S.) to replace BMW as auto supplier, with the star Pierce Brosnan driving its $200,000-plus Aston Martin Vanquish. Halle Berry, who plays the slinky Jinx, gets her own coral-coloured Thunderbird (it matches her string bikini).

That's just the tip of this 007 iceberg. Brosnan will sip Finlandia martinis, (shaken, not stirred), Bollinger champagne and 7-Up. He'll check his Omega wrist watch, phone contacts on a Philips, take snapshots with a Kodak and fly British Airways. First class, of course. And, oh yes, his luggage is Samsonite.

M, chief of Britain's M16 agency, (Judi Dench) and Miss Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) will sport hand-tailored suits by Brioni Roman Style. Struggling cosmetics giant Revlon has fashioned a Bond-themed line of lipsticks, nail polish and eye shadow.

It seems a bit much. One Internet site, http://www.007forever.com, joked the title should have been, For More Bucks Only. The brand-it-Bond craze even outdid Spielberg's Minority Report, with Cruise, which reportedly received $25-million in product-placement revenues from companies like Gap and Nokia.

But Die Another Day cost $100-million to make, the biggest-budget Bond movie ever. Which means the studios, eager to defray some of the cost, are eager to bring products into the mix, maybe even integrate it into the plot.

As Alan Middleton, a professor of marketing at York University's Schulich School of Business, sees it gutsy product placement is becoming the norm because economics and changing consumer tastes have dictated it.

The proliferation of new media options has broken audiences into bite-sized pieces. The growth of hundreds of new channels, the Internet and e-commerce, not to mention a sophisticated new generation of viewers with too little patience and too many options, means advertisers are jumping through hoops to get in your face.

On the TV side, the demand for programming is going up, while the audiences per channel decline. All of that means everyone -- in TV land, the Hollywood studios, music companies, the Web, and Broadway -- are rethinking the rules. Newton adds that the advent of new technologies like TiVo and Sonicblue out of the United States (which allows viewers to zap commercials altogether) have given product-placement even more momentum.

The old model, the 30-second TV spot, is proving less and less effective, agrees Middleton. "We live in an amazingly crowded world in terms of communication, and because of the noise level, we've got to look outside the traditional media box and be in many places, and unusual places too."

Luhrmann's use of fifties-era billboards in his opera, La Bohème, should not shock any sensibilities, the professor adds.

"We live, and have lived for a long time, in a commercial, consumer culture where brands and certain advertisements become icons, or points in time," he says. "Ads are now part of the language of our culture. So Baz Luhrmann has chosen to put ads on stage because they create the right cultural environment. Like he did with Moulin Rouge, he uses popular culture to ground himself."

Product placement is nothing new. In 1951, Katharine Hepburn tossed caseloads of Gordon's gin off Humphrey Bogart's stout little steamboat, The African Queen. In television, one of the first cases occured on Perry Mason, by mistake, when the production forgot to peel the Ford logo off a vehicle.

Then E.T. began nibbling on Reese's Pieces in 1982 and all hell broke loose.

So far Dahlquist says the blurring of advertising with programming is in its infancy. And still fairly tame. But he believes that is going to change. Some business models being presented in Hollywood disturb him, particularly deals where companies with financial involvement in the show, also have some pretty significant control over it.

He also points out that aggressive cross-platforming can backfire, and cites the recent cancellation of ABC's offbeat mystery series, Push, Nevada, created by Ben Affleck and Sean Bailey. Dahlquist says the show got off to a promising start, lining up heavyweight sponsors like Toyota and Sprint, who also helped finance a $1-million (U.S.) sweepstakes with the prize to go to a viewer who unravelled a puzzle linked to the show.

The problem was Push, Nevada was scheduled to go head to head on Thursdays with CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. It floundered. The sponsors -- whose products were getting decent airtime on the show -- got cranky.

The network decided to kill the show, says Dahlquist. ABC had to drag the series on, however, to abide by the sweepstakes' law and ensure the winner got paid. "So the show had to continue until Oct. 24, a good two or three episodes longer than it should have," he adds. "Advertisers who brought product placements in the show said, in print, they were dissatisfied with the way products were shown. For the amount of money that was spent, they were very unhappy."

Back in Toronto, where Premier Entertainment's business has never been better, Newton says he's run into very few of that kind of headaches. Primarily because he tries to keep his deals simple; placing Donzi boats in Charlie's Angels, and getting Smirnoff some good space in Meg Ryan's upcoming film, In the Cut, which is coming out next year.

As for My Big Fat Greek Wedding, sure, Newton says S.C. Johnson asked for a little more profile with the Windex bottle. And they got it because the producers -- who made the film on $5-million -- thought it would add to the realism of the script.

It turned out to be a bonus for everyone. The film has raked in more than $185-million (U.S.) so far. Vardalos, a relative unknown in celebrity circles, is tonight's host of Saturday Night Live. And S.C. Johnson? Well, the Wisconsin-based firm is still laughing all the way to the bank.

As the people's prophet Keith Richards once put it: "It's only selling out if they haven't paid you enough."