And the author going the other way can sound very odd. In the Brady Bunch there is a scene where one of the kids asks a friend “hey, are you going to the rock concert this weekend?” The friend replies “yes, I can’t wait to see the rock concert, I’m so excited”. They sound like absolute robots.

From someone that occasionally visits YouTube, hearing people talk about YouTube this and YouTube that numerous times in one conversation let alone in a day is very noticeable. Same thing goes for Reddit. Or TikTok. Or any $socialMediaPlatform.

If you're someone that visits and talks about any of those sites, it probably doesn't seem out of place to you. You probably don't even realize you're doing it. It's just something that is a natural thing to be discussed since that's where you spend your time.

Yes... Books, & TV shows are often brandless. We're used to that. It's how story land looks, but our world is full of brands.

How many brand names do we say per day?

What piqued my curiosity was that multiple and diverse characters were learning something on YouTube. A video how to use a Glock hand gun for one character, and their nemesis whom they want to kill, ALSO happened to watch a YouTube video on handling a gun. Everyone is learning so much with YouTube!

It felt strange. I recall the discussion about the aggressive advertising on YT so.. maybe I was primed to think this in reading.

People generally don't mention products at all unless they're specifically talking about the products. The only excepion is generic trademarks: product names which have become so common they entered the vernacular language. In my country, WhatsApp is synonymous with phone number. People don't ask what my number is, they ask for my WhatsApp. Eventually they got sick of it and shortened it to "zap".