LOS ANGELES – Mmm, mmm, good idea?

That’s what a lot of network executives will no doubt be trying to decide this fall as NBC’s “American Dreams” launches an ambitious product-placement campaign with Campbell Soup that will put those red-and-white cans on the shelves of the Pryor family home in a story line in which characters on the show enter an essay contest sponsored by the company.

On the show, set in 1960s Philadelphia, the prize will be a $5,000 college scholarship, and the contest will be mentioned over the course of several episodes.

Out here in the real world, a parallel essay contest, to be sponsored by the Camden, N.J.-based soup company and administered by Scholastic Inc., will give away a $100,000 scholarship as well as promote the show in its contest promotion.

Win-win, right?

That’s what “Dreams” creator Jonathan Prince is hoping, anyway.

The highly energetic Prince said he’d been looking for some time for a promotional hook like this for the show, which enters its third season Sept. 26, and he insists that Campbell’s presence will be subtle.

“I would never had done this if I didn’t think it would make the stories more interesting,” he said.

, adding that the Campbell’s connection will probably amount to “30-45 seconds every other episode.”

While product placement – the practice of putting sponsors’ products within the body of a show – has become standard practice in “reality” shows such as CBS’ “Survivor” and NBC’s “The Restaurant,” networks have so far trod lightly in the area of scripted programming, even amid increasing pressure from sponsors worried about those of us who zap commercials.

NBC chief Jeff Zucker, while citing a placement by a cookie company in the series finale of “Frasier,” said Sunday that “American Dreams” was the first NBC scripted series he was aware of to use product placement this extensively.

Which doesn’t mean you won’t see some pretty blatant commercial images in another NBC fall show, the animated “Father of the Pride.”

Not only does the comedy, which explores the private lives of the Siegfried & Roy lions, offer repeated shots of Las Vegas’ Mirage hotel-casino, where the magicians performed their act before Roy Horn was critically injured by one of his animals last year, but there’s an episode in which the odd duo invades a 7-Eleven in search of a Big Gulp that looks like something the company would have bought and paid for.

Not so, Zucker insisted.

In what he admits might be a business opportunity that’s so far gone unexploited, the writers apparently introduced the convenience store all on their own.

“We are not getting money for that … and it’s probably bad business on our part,” he said.

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Eight years after ABC News’ Ted Koppel walked out of the Republican convention in San Diego (and skipped the Democrats’ gathering altogether) because he felt there was nothing newsworthy happening there, the network’s preparing to do gavel-to-gavel coverage, anchored by Peter Jennings, of this summer’s conventions.

But you probably won’t see any more of the goings-on in New York and Boston on ABC than you will on CBS or NBC, both of which plan to air just a few hours – most likely three to four – on their main networks.

Reporters, anchors and executives of all the major networks have long complained that the conventions, which no longer choose candidates, have become extended infomercials for their parties (even as some of their news magazines engage in ever-more blatant infomercials for their own companies’ entertainment programs).

But what wasn’t worth doing on broadcast TV is apparently still worth doing off to the side.

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AP-NY-07-13-04 0901EDT