Pity ITV. No really - drop to your knees and pity it. Last week the culture secretary Andy Burnham refused to accept a European Union directive that would have paved the way for product placement on British television. On hearing the news, ITV's face fell.

Its shares soon followed suit.

As advertising revenue continues to dwindle, money is leaking from ITV's business model like blood from a harpooned steak. Cutbacks will be inevitable, and chances are we'll see the results on screen. Forget dumbing-down; fear cheapening-up. Instead of a star-studded Doctor Who knock-off stuffed with pricey CGI dinosaurs, the next series of Primeval will be a reality show in which Patrick Kielty and Lembit Opik drive around Staines in an ice-cream van trying to catch dogs in a net. Loose Women will become Loose Woman, a daytime talk show in which a menopausal fishwife stands alone in a cupboard-sized studio, staring into a mirror and gossiping about herself. And in a bid to cut down on location fees, from now on the detectives in Lewis will be solving murders that have taken place in their imaginations; each episode will consist of nothing but footage of Lawrence Fox and Kevin Whately sitting in chairs screwing their eyes up and frowning a bit.

Boo hoo hoo. Bad news for telly.

On the face of it, Burnham's reasons for rejecting product placement couldn't be more sound. Trust in television is already at an all-time low following last year's string of call-in scandals, when viewers were effectively pick-pocketed by the box in the corner of their living room. Many people now stare at their TV set for hours not because they like the programmes it shows, but because they're worred it might start nicking stuff while their back's turned. And Burnham recognises that blurring the line between shows and ads won't exactly help matters. "Product placement exacerbates this decline in trust and contaminates our programmes," he said. "As a viewer I don't want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director."

He's got a point there, although it might be worth giving the commercial marketing director a go - just once, in the spirit of fairness - to see what he comes up with. Love in the Time of the Arrow Information Paradox? The New

Adventures of Spreadsheet, PI? Brand Awareness Way? OK, so the dialogue might be impenetrable, but it couldn't possibly be as boring as the latest Poliakoff exercise in mastur-guff.

Anyway, Burnham's right. But the world is wrong. ITV's got to pay for its programmes somehow and, in the current environment, prohibiting product placement altogether seems a bit like telling a bunch of starving plane crash survivors shivering in a lifeboat that they're not allowed to start eating corpses for sustenance. No one wants to switch on the box and see Fireman Sam banging on about the great taste of Disprin, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

One solution is to allow product placement after all, provided it's subtle, and provided the advertisers have no say in the editorial content. Lingering pack shots, or dialogue such as, "Taggart, according to an animated multimedia text I've just received on my new Sony Ericcson t85X, there's been a murder" are out, obviously. But I for one couldn't give a toss if Doc Martin is shown spreading Marmite - proper, branded Marmite - on his toast. Actually, I don't care if he spreads it on his balls, because I don't watch Doc Martin, but you get the point - if Marmite wants to pay to stock his on-screen kitchen, and that makes the show cheaper, which in turn means fewer ad breaks in the middle of it, therefore allowing me to spend more time wallowing in a world of uninterrupted fiction, then I'm happy. Well, OK, not happy - never happy - but not much closer to suicide either. That's a plus.

Another option is to advertise in new and exciting ways. A few weeks ago Honda ran a live skydiving commercial. Why stop there? Why not stage your own advertorial Olympics consisting solely of 30-second sponsored events broadcast live across the globe? (Nanoseconds after typing this I've realised it's a brilliant idea, so any ad agencies reading this should consider it copyrighted by me as of now. Use it if you like, but it'll cost you - give my slice of the royalties to Amnesty International, just to annoy the Chinese.)

Or turn hardcore. Let's say you're trying to launch a new soft drink. Traditionally you'd have to spend millions on a commercial, and millions more booking airtime for it. Screw that. Here's what you do: put up one billboard. Just one. Somewhere on a route near Buckingham Palace or Downing Street. Point a camera at it 24/7. Then simply pay a sniper to assassinate someone of global importance when they pass in front of it. Bingo! The clip will run on an endless loop on every news channel in the world, for eternity. Even as viewers gasp in horror watching the victim's head explode like a watermelon, they'll simultaneously be thinking "What's that? New Plum-Flavoured Pepsi? Cool!" each time a chunk of skull flies past your logo.

Talk about brand awareness. That's the future, right there. All it needs is its own twatty marketing-speak buzzterm - something like "Killvertising" or "Atroci-publicity" - and within about six months it'll even seem halfway acceptable. Go creatives. Go you.