Product Placement in Movies and TV

[Jake Gittes]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE

Edited June 22, 2015 by Jake Gittes

[IndustriousAngel]

If it's too much (or out-of-place) it pulls (or pushes) me out of a movie. There was a time when I found the 007 movies barely watchable because of the stuff; nowadays they do it more sensibly (and still get the same bucks if not more I'd guess).

 

Fun fact: "The Love Bug" had no product placement from Volkswagen at all, even all VW logos had to be removed because Volkswagen didn't give them permission to use it. Unconceivable nowadays.

[TServo2049]

I have no problem with product placement when it makes logical sense for those products to show up where they show up in the movie, and when it doesn't call attention to itself (like that Subway clip does).

I had no problem with the product placement in Jurassic World because Disney and Universal have Downtown/CityWalk type things full of "name" stores and restaurants, and of course you'd expect them there (especially with the "this has all become mundane" angle).

Other movies where I find product placement to be non-intrusive, or at least it fits into the film's reality:

Home Alone (they live in the Chicago area, O'Hare is a huge American Airlines hub IRL, and American had/still has nonstop service to Paris from O'Hare, it makes absolute perfect sense that they are flying to Paris on AA)

Back to the Future (Marty drinks Pepsi, he wears Nikes, his brother works at Burger King and is at the dinner table in his uniform on the way to work, Hill Valley has a Texaco gas station and a Toyota dealership, Biff complains that George only has [Miller] Lite beer in the fridge, etc. You would expect those to appear in the real world. And they use the product placement for the purposes of cute gags on differences between 1955 and 1985 - Marty is confused to see the Texaco attendants servicing the car, he doesn't know how to open a Pepsi bottle, the car dealership sells Studebakers instead of Toyotas, etc.)

IMO, BTTF is a case study on how to do product placement right - non-intrusive, fits into the film's reality, they're real-world products and brand names exactly where you'd expect to see them, and characters do not make gratuitous, unnecessary references to the products (two examples: Marty does not name drop Toyota when he sees the 4x4; and at no point during the dinner scene does anyone actually mention that the older brother works at Burger King - we just see the small logos on his uniform). If all films handled product placement as well as BTTF did, I don't know if anybody would even be complaining about it.

Edited June 22, 2015 by TServo2049

[Killimano3]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE

 

Oh god that's cringeworthy XD

 

Best Subway product placement I've seen is probably from Chuck and Community when they were on NBC. It was done in that REALLY obvious way (Big Mike's character in Chuck was basically just talking about Subway). But it was done in SUCH an obvious way that you could tell they were really making fun of it.

[passerby]

All the product placement in Jurassic Park was distracting. But at the same time so true because theme parks HAVE so much product placement. I can't tell if they were doing it on purpose or what.

 

Re: Apple.

 

The thing with Apple is that most creative people use Apple. And they started using it when Apple was DEAD -- it use to be a PC world back then. And back then, Apple had much better prosumer tools for filmmakers than other companies. Everyone who used a mac during that era got shit for it too. So it felt very much like a cult -- you banded together if you had a mac and you pressured your friends to no avail to get macs. It makes sense that creatives would put macs and Apple in their movies when the choice is available, subliminally promoting the very machines they were using to spite the world. It's no longer like that.

 

Nowadays, other machines do creative ventures just as well but the stigma still stands. The design firm I use to work at last summer was completely Apple, not one person had a windows. Even the engineers using SolidWorks were running it on their macs via bootcamp or parallels.

Edited June 22, 2015 by passerby

[Jonwo]

Madagascar 3 had a shameless plug for HP printers which wasn't surprising as HP are the makers of the computers used to make DWA films.

[mulder42]

Oh god that's cringeworthy XD

 

Best Subway product placement I've seen is probably from Chuck and Community when they were on NBC. It was done in that REALLY obvious way (Big Mike's character in Chuck was basically just talking about Subway). But it was done in SUCH an obvious way that you could tell they were really making fun of it.

 

I watch H50 and that was WAY over the top.  Totally unnecessary.  They usually do something with the laptops they use or the search engine, but I have to agree--that was cringeworthy with Subway.  

[chasmmi]

Back to the Future (Marty drinks Pepsi, he wears Nikes, his brother works at Burger King and is at the dinner table in his uniform on the way to work, Hill Valley has a Texaco gas station and a Toyota dealership, Biff complains that George only has [Miller] Lite beer in the fridge, etc. You would expect those to appear in the real world. And they use the product placement for the purposes of cute gags on differences between 1955 and 1985 - Marty is confused to see the Texaco attendants servicing the car, he doesn't know how to open a Pepsi bottle, the car dealership sells Studebakers instead of Toyotas, etc.)

 

 

Not to mention his name was Calvin Klein becuase it was sewn into his underpants.

[TServo2049]

How did I forget that? That was absolute genius.

Though that wasn't product placement AFAIK, I'm pretty sure that was written into the script and *then* they went to Calvin Klein to get their permission. OTOH, stuff like Burger King seemed to be placement deals; while Zemeckis and Gale did always intend the older brother to be a fast-food worker in the original timeline, in the script the brother was actually described as wearing a McDonald's uniform. (Kind of like how M&M's were used in the script for E.T., not Reese's Pieces.)

...shit, how could I forget Reese's Pieces in E.T. for my examples of non-intrusive placement? Yes, it would have been even more non-intrusive had it actually been M&M's as it was in the script, but you would expect that if a kid wanted to bait an alien with bite-sized candy, he would have a major name-brand candy around.

Edited June 24, 2015 by TServo2049

[dashrendar44]

Not to mention his name was Calvin Klein becuase it was sewn into his underpants.

 

LOL in french, they translated it as Pierre Cardin who is one of the most famous fashion designers like Yves Saint-Laurent or Karl Lagerfeld.

Edited June 24, 2015 by MADash Rendar

[The Futurist]

Demolition Man was hilarious.

We don t have Taco Bell.

So they had the actors replacing Taco Bell in post prod saying Pizza Hut and horrible digital (1994) Pizza Hut logo insertion.

 

And Sony Movies are hilarious at this point.

I heard CHAPPIE is basically a PS4 infomercial.

[TServo2049]

Are you sure it was dubbing/digital replacement? I read a version of the story saying they actually filmed two different versions of the scenes. (Taco Bell and Pizza Hut were and still are under common ownership.)

Edited June 24, 2015 by TServo2049

[Dementeleus]

it would have been even more non-intrusive had it actually been M&M's as it was in the script,...

 

Didn't they approach M&M's and got turned down?

[TServo2049]

Yes. That is exactly what happened.

One of the most hilarious product placement screwups was Grease. Allan Carr, the producer, made a promotional deal with Pepsi, but the set designers for the cafe scene were not told of this (or the scene had already been shot), and there were several Coke products and logos in the scene. Most of them had to be removed from the finished scene, in a time before CGI. For example, you can clearly see a gray box matted onto a rectangular area on the menu board where there was clearly a Coca-Cola logo.

Also, in The Goonies, Mouth's reference to Chunk claiming to have eaten his weight in Godfather's Pizza was ADR. It is difficult to tell what the original on-set line was - Domino's? Pizza Hut? Either way, just a funny tidbit.

Edited June 24, 2015 by TServo2049

[Kvikk Lunsj]

Didn't they approach M&M's and got turned down?

Yep Reese sales increased over 300% because of the movie. 

[chasmmi]

How about The Internship?

[Deep Wang]

Watching The Junior Mint episode of Seinfeld. That's a great bit of product placement!

[ladyevenstar22]

i don't even remember man of steel movie let alone ads in it ...and until someone mentioned it i hadn't even paid attention to ads in jurrasic world who has time for that when you got dinooooosaurs !!!!

 

that said i use to watch a telenovela and they had a deal with clorox LMAOOOOO at least 3 times per episode one of the maids would pick a bottle open it to use to pass the mop in the kitchen or some room in the mansion or use the wipes , us fans use to joke it had to be the cleanest house in the world or that the reason why the maid or other characters made such dumb decisions was because of all the fumes they were inhaling  !

 

sometimes they can be harmless fun as long as they're not subliminally telling you its ok to become a terrorist and behead people i think we can manage without necessarily be seen as mindless drones the whole lot of us .

Edited July 1, 2015 by Mistress of RDJ TONY STARK

[baumer]

What about Back to the Future?  That was obviously sponsored by Pepsi.  It's all throughout the film and it's in the script.  

[TServo2049]

I brought that one up, as an example of a film where the product placement doesn't call attention to itself. All the soft drinks in the movies are Pepsi, but the labels are not always obviously pointed to the camera, and when they do directly reference Pepsi it's for the purpose of jokes (the "Pepsi Free" joke, Marty not knowing how to open the 1955 Pepsi bottle or the 2015 Pepsi bottle)

Edited July 2, 2015 by TServo2049