Can’t we just have TiVos implanted in our brains?

I took advantage of some time off early this year to go to the movies. I saw six movies in 10 days and liked almost all of them. Unfortunately, I also had to sit through 37 commercials in the six movie theaters, and I didn’t like any of them.

Commercials in movie theaters are not new, of course. But there are more of them now than ever before. Figures aren’t available yet for 2004, but I’ll bet they’re bigger than 2003, when marketers spent $356 million on theater ads, a 37% increase from 2002, according to the Cinema Advertising Council.

I really resent this ad creep. When I’m paying $8, $10, $12 to go to a theater, where I’m a captive viewer, I shouldn’t have to sit through a barrage of commercials. By the time the commercials, the previews of coming attractions and the promotions for the theater chain, the theater’s sound system and its concession stand are done, I feel like I’ve already sat through the entire Jerry Lewis telethon.

A friend who was visiting from New York told me he’s equally upset by this trend-cum-imposition, so he now stands up and turns his back to the screen during every commercial. I told him that’s almost as rude and insensitive to the people seated behind him as the commercials themselves. But I can understand his reaction.

Commercials in movie theaters are just one element -- and, for me, an especially aggravating one -- in the increasing commercialization of all aspects of American society. Pop-up ads on your computer. Longer blocks of commercials on drive-time radio. Product placement everywhere you look.

Like theater commercials, pop-up ads are particularly annoying because they’re imposed on a captive audience. Radio commercials also play to a captive audience, though with those, you can at least switch stations or pop in a CD. Radio commercials used to be limited to 18 minutes per hour, but deregulation legislation in 1981 eliminated that restriction (among many others). As the Washington Post reported last year, “commercial loads of 25 minutes per hour [are] increasingly common” these days, and breaks for advertising on Howard Stern’s morning show “have been clocked at as long as 18 minutes 48 seconds, with as many as 30 separate spots jammed together.”

But product placement is an even greater imposition than these others because it’s sneaky, dishonest -- commercials masquerading as entertainment.

The 2002 movie “Minority Report” carried what amounted to stealth advertising for so many readily identifiable products -- Reebok, Gap, American Express and Nokia, among others -- that the movie could have been called “Consumer Reports.”

Audi was even more visible in last year’s “I, Robot,” and White Castle’s dreadful burgers actually got star billing in “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.”

Worried about the declining audience for prime-time network TV shows and terrified that TiVo and other new digital video technology will increasingly enable viewers to zap or skip traditional commercials, advertisers are also pushing their sales messages through product placement on many television series.

Wall-to-wall publicity

Product placement is now so ubiquitous that Commercial Alert, an Oregon-based nonprofit whose mission is to “keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere,” has asked both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to “require prominent disclosure of embedded advertising on television.”

The print media are also vulnerable to stealth advertising, and last fall, 61 journalism and law professors sent a letter to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, asking for the enactment of new rules to prohibit the disguising of advertising as editorial content and to require the disclosure of product placement in their publications.

Brand names appear more frequently in magazine stories these days, the professors said, and they quoted editors who said requests from advertisers to “blur the lines between advertising and editorial” material had accelerated in the last year.

There is a long history of commercialization in the United States, of course. Our icons have often been commercial figures who were as virtual -- as nonexistent -- as that yellow first-down line the networks now digitally insert in football telecasts: Betty Crocker. Aunt Jemima. Chef Boyardee. The Marlboro Man.

But when the Marlboro Man rode tall on Sunset Boulevard billboards, there was nothing stealthy or subliminal about him. He was clearly there to sell cigarettes. Today’s product placement and other, equally furtive sales pitches are designed to sneak past our radar, our natural skepticism about direct commercial pitches.

No bones about it

Commercialization seems worst of all in sports, and, perhaps because sports are so direct, the commercials don’t bother with what Vance Packard called “hidden persuaders.” The commercial pitch is right out there, upfront, no need to be furtive.

We’ve just finished a college football bowl season that amounted to one continuous corporate commercial -- the

FedEx Orange Bowl, the Nokia Sugar Bowl, the Toyota Gator Bowl, the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, the Continental Tire Bowl, the Capital One Bowl....

With Frank McCourt, the owner of the Dodgers, having unloaded Adrian Beltre and several other Dodger stars in recent weeks in a foolish effort to cut costs, I shudder to think how intrusive commercialization will be next season when he tries to maximize revenue.

If you tuned in to Dodger radio broadcasts last season, you may have noticed that the announcers no longer gave the “starting lineups.” Nope, they gave the “opening lineups.”

Huh?

Well, it seems that this particular portion of the broadcasts was sponsored by Wayne-Dalton, makers of -- you guessed it -- garage-door openers. So naturally the “starting lineup” became the “opening lineup,” a term heretofore missing from the baseball lexicon.

And right after that, the Dodger announcers gave you the “game-time temperature” -- sponsored by York, a heating and air conditioning company.

The names of the starting pitchers -- the men who “deliver the first pitch” -- were brought to you by that delivery service nonpareil, UPS. And when the Dodgers’ starting pitcher did not go the full nine innings -- and they seldom did-- there was a “Cingular call to the bullpen.”

How about the outfield fence at Dodger Stadium?

Signage is an increasingly important source of revenue at most big-league ballparks these days, of course, but what bothers me about the Dodger fence is that the names and, especially, the photos of some of the greatest Dodger pitchers in the team’s storied history are light, ghostly, deliberately faded, difficult to discern, while the ads surrounding them are portrayed in a bright, almost blinding white that could be read from the Goodyear blimp above.

I guess there’s just no escaping commercials anywhere. According to the Wall Street Journal, Madison Avenue’s biggest advertising targets for this year will be cellphones, iPods and BlackBerries. It’s bad enough to have your cellphone ring at an inopportune moment. It will be even worse if you answer and, instead of hearing the familiar voice of your wife, son or mother, you hear someone trying to sell you a new car.

The only good news is that this might persuade some otherwise cretinous moviegoers to obey when the “Please turn off your cellphones and beepers” announcement is made -- between commercials, of course -- in their local theater.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.