• The New York Times, Friday, August 10, 2007 12 PM

Consumer goods companies, which once saw packages largely as containers for shipping their products, are now using them more as 3-D ads to grab shoppers' attention. The shift is mostly because of the rise of the Internet and hundreds of TV channels, which mean marketers can no longer count on people seeing their commercials.

In the last 100 years, Pepsi had changed the look of its can, and before that its bottles, only 10 times. This year, the soft-drink maker will switch designs every few weeks. Coors Light bottles now have labels that turn blue when the beer is chilled to the right temperature. Huggies' Henry the Hippo hand soap bottles have a light that flashes for 20 seconds to show children how long they should wash their hands. Kleenex is selling tissues in oval packages.

The average life of a package before its next makeover is down to two years, marketing executives say, from about seven as recently as the 1990s. Some companies are studying technology to put a computer chip and tiny speaker inside a package. A package of cheese could say "I go well with Triscuit crackers" when a shopper takes it off the shelf.

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