Along with billions of other women, I saw Sex & the City this weekend with two friends. There was one lucky, or perhaps unlucky, male in the entire theatre. It was a very enjoyable movie and surpassed my extremely low expectations. I only have problems with how it ended, but I won’t share my opinion until everyone has seen it to not spoil anything.

A thing that I tend to notice a lot more than most is product placement in TV shows and movies. I notice it so much I get distracted from the actual storyline and focus my attention on the strategically placed product. Reese’s Pieces was one of the first deliberate attempts of product placement in a Hollywood movie back in 1982. I remember being about 10-years-old and my mother rented E.T. for my brother and I to watch and bought some Reese’s Pieces so she could teach us about product placement. Not every mother does that for their kids.

I found the product placement in the Sex & the City movie to be very obvious and distracting. Vanity Fair has provided a full list of the product placement in the film. I didn’t even notice half of the products on the list, maybe because there was so many I tuned them out. I understand the justification for all the product placement: companies pay big bucks, and who in their right money-making mind would turn it down?

My question is this: how much is too much product placement?

A movie that I thought cleverly used product placement was Talladega Nights, an underrated film in my opinion. I thought it was brilliant for them to use so much product placement while poking fun at how brand driven NASCAR is. A good move on the film producers part to be reaping the monetary benefits of all that product placement but apparently that wasn’t exactly the case,

To top it all off, none of the brands had to pay integration fees for their placements—an increasingly common occurrence as brands seek more prominent roles in entertainment content. With Ferrell and Talladega co-writer and director Adam McKay writing Wonder Bread, Perrier and dozens of other brands into the script to poke fun at the over-the-top corporate sponsorship in Nascar races, the filmmakers needed the brands’ involvement just as much, if not more, than the brands wanted to be in the film—a rare occurrence in the branded entertainment space.

I can’t seem to recall a specific instance of product placement working on me. It must have at some point or another, but was so well placed I didn’t even notice. I didn’t go run out and buy a Louis Vuitton purse after seeing Sex & the City, but probably a lot of people did.

So, moral of the story is don’t sit next to me at the movie as I will probably bother you and point out every product that I notice.