Desperate times in the music biz call for devious measures. As dwindling sales compel recording giants like Sony Music to slash 10% of staff worldwide, record producers are turning to commercial producers for help.

The latest trend is to team record label artists with advertising agencies and clients to offset the cost of video production.

Last month the LA Times reported that General Motors had forked out roughly $300,000 US for its Hummer vehicle's appearance in Ms. Jade's "Ching Ching" video, produced by Interscope Records - half the cost of producing the music vid, according to the report.

Product placement is a decades-old trick. The difference is that over the past few years, industry insiders say that MTV's censors have forced record producers to edit out brand names from their artists' videos, which is hitting producers where it hurts.

Editors don't mind it so much.

"I can't tell you how many [videos] Jive [Records] has brought over - 'Can you blur the Nike logo?'" says Brooke Abernathy, exec producer at four-year-old NY-based post house Purple Cow, which is rapidly moving out of music video production into the more lucrative commercial market. She says Purple Cow often "fixes up" brand-ridden videos so that artists' songs can actually get aired.

How the Hummers got past MTV's hall monitors is anyone's guess. This type of product insertion is not a foolproof way to beat the censors and it's also very unimaginative, says Mark Humphrey, who runs LA's BandAd - a company that acts as a broker between agencies and record producers by making "creative matches" (see Boards, Oct. 2002).

Humphrey, formerly head of sales at Quentin Tarantino's prodco A Band Apart, favors a two-in-one music video/spot shoot, using the artist's song in a TV commercial and then replicating the ad's feel in a music video, minus the product.

The advantage from a music company's perspective is that the agency helps foot video production costs. And for the director and crew, it usually tacks on an extra day for a :30 commercial.

Thus far, the most famous example is American Express kicking in roughly $350,000 on top of a $550,000 video shoot for singer Sheryl Crow in Hawaii. Humphrey swung the deal with Ogilvy & Mather while he was at A Band Apart. Directed by Wayne Isham, the video "Soak Up the Sun" looked and sounded like the spot, minus the Amex cards.

Brendan O'Malley, senior partner at Ogilvy & Mather in New York, says O&M tried something similar with Miller Lite's "Portraits" of musical artists last year. One series featured Chris Isaak, Pat Green and the Kumbia Kings.

"Frankly, after that experience, we generally found musicians wanting a tremendous amount of money to partake," O'Malley says, adding that Kid Rock got the agency and Miller involved in a bidding war against Coors, "who paid twice as much". Ultimately, O&M decided that "everyone was trying to create a musical brand image for their various brands and there was not a lot of 'own-ability' to musician-oriented ads, especially in the beer business."

Another problem was that, rather than being grateful for a new revenue stream, music industry execs got greedy. O'Malley recalls that while record companies were falling over themselves to participate in the Miller campaign, "the managerswanted more money to use the music, and the publishers wanted crazy amounts of money."

Nevertheless, Humphrey claims to have four such arrangements on the go in LA, NY and London, but won't talk about them in case MTV gets wind of the deals.

"It's almost becoming a game," Humphrey says. "The more clever and hidden the association, the greater the creative." Record labels and ad agency clients pay BandAd a retainer fee; once the co-fund is in place, Humphrey hooks them up with directors on both sides of the Atlantic.

The helmers he chooses are primarily spot shooters who've won occasional awards for music videos. "That makes it agency-safe and label-happy," Humphrey says. "It's the perfect combination."

He insists this video/commercial hybrid doesn't take money away from crews and directors, because the crew still shoots each one separately. The ad is "basically an extension of the music video. It extends it for a day, injecting more money into music videoproduction."

Like Amex, the client usually coughs up at least one-third more to tack on an extra day - the length of time it takes to shoot the 30-second content for thecommercial.

Although BandAd's solution is creative, Humphrey concedes it won't help address revenue erosion in the music biz. "We could market our arses off," he says, "but the kids have still got to go and buy the bloody record."

MTV execs were unavailable forcomment at press time.