Nokia recently announced its first touch-screen mobile phone, the 5800 XpressMusic. Nokia convinced Britney Spears to include the phone in her most recent music video, placing the 5800 squarely in front of the eyes of its target market (a.k.a., young'uns).Product placement in TV shows, movies, and music videos is nothing new. Quite honestly, it has been a while since I sat down and watched a music video, but I've seen more than my fair share of mobile phones given a prominent placement in videos by artists such as Fergie, Michael Buble, and John Mayer.

We can now count Britney Spears as the unlikely, unofficial spokesperson for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. MocoNews reports:

Just 23 seconds into the video, Nokia's new 5800 XpressMusic cell phone gets a 4-second nearly full-screen appearance as the video's lead male character pulls up the device's calendar. Ironically, the appointment glaring at the bottom of his screen reads 'product placement meeting.' The touch-screen phone makes another appearance exactly a minute later as the 'womanizing' fellow shoots video of Britney Spears in landscape mode while she sits on a copy machine in an office break room. In all, the 5800 gets about 7 seconds of screen time in a video that runs for 3 minutes and 46 seconds.

Seven seconds is a lot of screen time for a cell phone in a music video. In 2007, a Fergie video spotlighted a version of the Motorola Razr, along with Motorola's S9 stereo Bluetooth headphones. Fergie also showed off the Motorola Rokr E8 in a video earlier this year. In both instances, the phone was on screen for perhaps a second or less.

Since the 5800 is an important phone for Nokia, I am not at all surprised that the company is making sure its target market gets an eyeful of the touch-based device.

(In case you're interested, you can view the video here.)