Amazon asked The Boys to do product placement; they mocked the concept instead

From the start, The Boys has satirized everything from media to politics; the series began as a parody of the superhero movie boom we've been in since Iron Man came out in 2008, and has since evolved into an ongoing critique of American authoritarianism. In the most recent episode, we visited the V52 expo, an obvious play on Disney's D23 convention, where the studio shows off what it has in store in the coming years. Disney once infamously debuted a chart showing dozens of superhero movies on the way. The Boys raised the stakes with his monster:

The V52 gave The Boys writers a chance to skewer everything that annoys them about modern media. That included a dig at digital product placement, a new kind of marketing strategy where different products will appear in an episode of TV depending on the demographic of the person watching at home. The example the presents at V52 give is that if a white person is watching, they'll see a character drink an IPA. But if a Black person is watching, the IPA will turn into "Imperial Peach Cognac."

Obviously this is racist, and the Black people in the audience at V52 did not seem enthusiastic. Vought's "Black At It" initiative is also cringey in the extreme. It's all meant to mock companies that leverage diversity and inclusion as shallow marketing strategies, and all very on brand for The Boys.

But as showrunner Eric Kripke revealed on Twitter, digital product placement where the products change depending on who's watching is a real thing. In fact, Amazon asked him and his team to implement it. They weren't interested, but they did tell us exactly what they thought of the idea in the episode:

According to TheWrap, there are still some kinks to work out before digital product placement becomes commonplace; getting a brand deal in place can take months, and it's hard to design a digital product that won't look fake. But this kind of thing is probably coming, and when it does, we can't say The Boys didn't warn us.

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