Brand diversification...

I used to love the National Geographic magazine, perfect for all the information you needed for any kind of school project and full of interesting pictures and diagrams to contrast the long, boring articles. When I became a bit older, the articles were actually okay, even if they were mostly written in that awful arch magazine style that makes so many publications utterly exhausting to read. But the National Geographic channel is mostly awful. Somehow it always manages to be less informative and a lot more pointlessly stupid than Discovery. There's a hell of a lot more 'America's blankest blank' á la Fox, and a lot less things you actually want to know. This is beyond the pale though. Who in their right minds would buy National geographic endorsed scents? What's next? The Economist sponsored global capitalism meal at McDonald's? Did the latest round of re- or deconglomeration turn these two into strange bedfellows? And what marketing dickhead engineered this?