For some allowing anything commercial to have any level of influence on a movie robs it of something. Worthiness or some such probably. Thus they see product placement as a corruption of the film art form.

I don’t agree. Not entirely. Product placement can be done badly and distract the audience. But it doesn’t have to be done badly. Being paid to include something in an artwork doesn’t have to diminish it.

Product placement can be seen as akin to the depiction of donors in paintings as transpired around the time of the Renaissance. In Masaccio’s Trinity (circa 1428) the donor and his wife are depicted praying. They are outside the arch, on a lower level, and at the same scale as the other figures in the painting. Titan’s Pesaro Madonna, painted between 1519 and 1526, includes donor portraits of five members of the commissioning Pesaro family.

The Renaissance isn’t the earliest period when donor portraits appeared. Anicia Juliana is depicted in a donor portrait in the Vienna Dioscurides, one of the earliest and most lavish illuminated manuscripts still in existence.

An artist’s costs were covered by donors. Product placement helps filmmakers with the cost of making their movie or its promotion.

Donors appearing in paintings was an extensive practice. We don’t look at these paintings and think that including the donor has somehow made them lessened them. No, we look at them and see art.