• Advertising Age, Tuesday, December 18, 2012 2:49 PM

"Gossip Girl," which ended its five-year stint on CW Monday night, was a landmark show for product placement, as  "perhaps... the training ground for a horde of tech-savvy advertisers trying to find ways to make their products seem less complex and more easy to adapt to modern lifestyles," writes Brian Steinberg. With most characters "rich beyond viewers' wildest dreams," it made sense for them to have the latest tech devices and show how such devices worked, "whether that activity involved checking a map or trying to identify a new song," according to Steinberg. "'Gossip Girl' helped make it OK, more or less, for name-brand technology to share the screen with actors and actresses."

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