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"The Lexus loaner turned out to be a GS Hybrid. To say it was an upgrade from the battered Crown Vic I'd driven with the LAPD would be an understatement. For one, you don't need a key. You keep the remote control thing in your pocket and to start the car you just push a button on the dash. Like on a computer. In fact the car's more like a super-powered laptop on wheels than anything else."

Call it a fictomercial, a literatisement, branded entertainment. Lexus doesn't really care. As long as it makes people lust after its new top-of-the-line car. The story is being published in three installments in the Lexus quarterly magazine, which is sent to owners, the last part coming this spring. It's also available, with interactive features, on the company's Web site.

Subtlety is one of the keys to placing a product name in media aimed at sophisticated consumers, says Richard Nelson, head of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. "If it's so heavily overloaded that it's basically a commercial, people aren't going to want to read it, and they won't buy it."

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Some companies have soft-pedaled products in "billboard novels." In the comic novel "Men in Aprons," which Electrolux commissioned and this year will sell on its Web site (and make available for downloads), the vacuum-cleaner brand won't even be mentioned, but the hero will be seen vacuuming. Several years ago, when BMW commissioned a series of film shorts, starring Clive Owen as a BMW-driving chauffeur and created by a bevy of A-list Hollywood directors, the cars went unnamed (though who doesn't know the BMW logo?).