Hot or not?

I found this opening sentence from Ad Age’s Madison + Vine newsletter, which covers “cutting-edge” marketing practices, to be hilarious:

NEW YORK -- Two niche cable networks are finding marketing bucks in one of advertising’s hottest trends: turning the advertiser into content producer.

There is nothing hot nor trendy about advertisers as content producers. Television is simply coming full circle, back to its early days, when cigarette and gas companies sponsored and wrote TV shows. Eventually church and state were separated, and now they’re coming back together as part of an attempt to squeeze cash from the fading mass media model.