Yes, it is naturally subjective. I don't think it's out of control, either, as it happens.
If we accept that product placement is necessary, I think we would agree that it is best used so that it does not seem completely extraneous to or at odds with the plot of the film or the characters within it. Philip Morris reportedly paid $200,000 for Lark cigarettes to be used in Licence to Kill: Bond's remote trigger, you may remember, is disguised as a packet of the cigarettes. I don't think it's a great piece of product placement, because those cigarettes are sold in Japan, so why would they be used as camouflage by a British agent operating in Latin America? However, it's a mere few seconds of the film and it's not really dwelt over enough to be a problem. If James Bond, however, had had a piece of dialogue in which he asked by name for some Lark cigarettes, I hope you would agree that that would be a little over the top - as well as being rather more blatantly an advert, it just doesn't seem that the character would smoke that brand of cigarettes (unless, perhaps, he was in Japan).
So I think there are grades of it, and most of the time they've come the right side of it. But I think there have been some moments in the series where product placement has needlessly impeded scenes. One is the hotel scene in Die Another Day that you mentioned, where Bond asks Mr Chang to 'send up his tailor'. I think that's a little like Bond smoking Lark cigarettes. He's in Hong Kong and he needs a suit, but he can't leave the hotel. This, I think, was a brilliantly Fleming-esque set-up. If it had been in a Fleming novel, I think the character would have done almost the same thing; Fleming might have had him buy a copy of a local newspaper in the lobby and turn to the back to find an advert for a tailor, or told us about the first time he used the man's services; no doubt we would have had a gloriously insider-ish and well-researched description on the tailoring industry of Hong Kong and how fantastic these guys are, almost on a par with Savile Row, and so on.
This sort of article sometimes appears in British broadsheets and magazines. If they had done that in the film, I think it would have been great. But they couldn't, of course, because they have a deal with Brioni. The problem I have there - and I accept that I am being very fanboyish about it, and it's probably even less noticeable to most people than the Lark thing - is that it simply doesn't make any sense. Although they do sometimes make bespoke suits, Brioni is not a tailor: James Bond is a stickler for details, and would know this one. And if a tailor was indeed sent up, those shirts must be fake, surely, because they have Brioni labels on the inside collar but Brioni did not have a branch in Hong Kong and do not work in that way.
I appreciate it's a passing moment in the film, but it's a moment that I think is untrue to the character, and not really thought through properly. They just wanted to get the Brioni shirts in there. I don't think it's very good advertising either, because it actually suggests that James Bond wears Brioni knock-offs! All of which is minute detail - but that's partly what James Bond is about, surely? Getting the details right. I don't believe he'd wear Brioni at all, but if he's going to, at least try to integrate it in a way that is artful and makes sense within the story.
