Have you seen those adverts for Truth? You know, the anti-tobacco industry campaign group?

No, not the big two pages adverts between the pages of the stories. Not those ones. I mean, obviously you've seen them - you can't miss them. But those aren't the ones I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the ones in the stories themselves. At least, in Marvel's stories.

For your consideration:-

MEKANIX #4, page 19 panel 7 - a "Truth" logo, greyed out, appears on the back wall of the room where a student organisation is debating anti-mutant hatred.

BLACK PANTHER #54, page 4, panel 6 - a "Truth" logo on a billboard, in orange (and just about in line with the captions, in fact).

IRON MAN #65, page 2 panel 3 - a "Truth" logo in bright orange is fixed to a pillar in the car park, just below the sign saying "Level 8", roughly dead centre in the panel.

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #36, page 2 panel 6 - amongst the pin-ups on Eddie Brock's wall is, inexplicably, a poster consisting of the "Truth" logo repeated three times.

THOR #59, pages 6-7 (double page spread), panel 1 - A "Truth" logo appears as a billboard.

AGENT X #7, page 8 panel 5 - A "Truth" billboard is prominently nailed to the outside of the lead character's office. As to quite why the organisation is taking out adverts in dilapidated fairgrounds that have been closed to the public for years, well, that's left as an exercise for the reader's imagination.

These examples come from the last two or three weeks. There may be more; I haven't bothered hunting for them. I think the point's clear enough.

'The last thing Marvel would want is to be seen as undermining the integrity of its stories.' What can we tell from this surprising plethora of logos? And it's always the logo, by the way, pasted into the art. Well, two possibilities present themselves. One is that a whole load of Marvel creators have independently decided they'd like to promote the work of this admirable organisation, who have very generously agreed to make their trademark available for the purpose. The other is that the logos are paid adverts, incorporated into the artwork itself. I don't need to tell you which option is the more plausible.

From what I've seen, Truth fancies itself as having an imaginative approach to marketing (and yes, I know the group likes to be called "truth", but I'll stick to capitalising my proper nouns, thanks). And this is certainly imaginative. I can't recall any previous advertising in comics that took this form.

There have been licensed comics, of course. You could argue that books like TRANSFORMERS and GI JOE were ultimately adverts for the toys, at least the first time round. But that's explicit advertising, which is another matter altogether. These are adverts that have nothing to do with the story, incorporated into backdrops. They may be intended as subliminal - it's hard to tell, given that they usually stick out a mile. I suppose if you're being technical, it can't strictly be product placement, because Truth has no product, merely a brand name to promote. But in substance, that's what it is.

It sets a surprising precedent. Marvel's general marketing strategy of late has been to promote the creators and use artistic merit as the primary selling point for its product. You would have thought that the last thing Marvel would want is to be seen as undermining the integrity of its stories by incorporating adverts - even if they are from a relatively innocuous campaign group rather than an Evil Corporation.

'I'm not convinced that this type of marketing is particularly effective.' There may, tenuously, be a creative argument for using genuine adverts if the story actually calls for a billboard in the background, as opposed to using fake ones. But that argument can scarcely be advanced to defend logos appearing on the front of Agent X's office. And the one in THOR defies belief. Bright orange in a double-page spread of grey colouring, it stands out a mile. Oh, and the scene in question takes place in 2026. I wonder, are we meant to be inspired that Truth will still be fighting the good fight in twenty-three years time, or depressed that it's still going? Truly, product placement gives rise to deep and subtle questions of artistic interpretation.

I'll be keeping an eye out over the next few weeks to identify the most absurd placement of a Truth advert, and see if THOR can be beaten. I'd been rather hoping that they might get one into last week's EXILES, but evidently the challenge of working an anti-smoking advert into a story set on a parallel world overrun by killer robots was just too much.

It's interesting to note that the comics selected for product placement seem to be largely those that Marvel would regard as playing to a more traditional audience. This month's THOR is a rather odd story, but that's because it's a fill-in by Christopher Priest. There seem to be no logos cropping up in books like ALIAS, X-STATIX, or UNSTABLE MOLECULES.

Maybe we're about to enter an exciting new phase of baseless speculation, where readers can infer how much respect a publisher has for one of its comics according to their willingness to plaster it with adverts? It would certainly be interesting to know to what extent the creative teams were consulted about the incorporation of adverts into their work.

Personally, I'm not convinced that this type of marketing is particularly effective anyway. Western society is very cynical about marketing at the moment. Product placement is generally seen, quite rightly, as one of the lowest forms of advertising, compromising artistic content and distracting from the reader's enjoyment, to however slight a degree.

I gather it's rather more common on US television than it is the UK. There were reports doing the rounds a while back that the first episode of season two of 24 was going to require editing to make it fit for broadcast by the BBC because the blatancy of the product placement breached company guidelines, for example. So perhaps Americans are more used to it than I am.

Nonetheless, I can hardly imagine it as the sort of advertising technique likely to make readers perceive Truth as a more trustworthy and reliable source of information - which surely is the point of its existence.

Truth's website generally takes a very self-conscious "anti-marketing" tone where it tries to position itself as sharing the reader's scepticism about marketing. This is itself disingenuous given that the site is so plainly the work of the marketing profession, but at least it has some link to Truth's purpose of undermining and exposing the deceptions of the tobacco industry.

Truth is clearly aware that marketing is associated with untrustworthiness and falsehood, a reputation that the industry has brought on itself. It is hard to see how it could possibly imagine that embarking on a product placement campaign would do anything other than associate it with those qualities, but there you go.

It doesn't do wonders for Marvel's image either - particularly the image Marvel wants to project as a publisher concerned with quality and artistic merit. The willingness to incorporate adverts into artwork is, if not wholly incompatible with that viewpoint, at least strongly inconsistent with it. The fact that Truth is a campaign group neuters that to some extent, but far from completely.

Of course, with the state of the comics industry, any publisher is going to be tempted by any new revenue stream. But some advertising campaigns are counterproductive for all concerned. This strikes me as one of them.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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