How Product Placement Works
Product placement is getting far more blatant in Movies nowadays and you can think up quick examples just from the top of your head like Audi and Iron Man for example or Up In The Air‘s constant jabs with American Airlines. But let’s look a little deeper at the thinking behind it and how far things will go.
Brands are getting involved far earlier in the screen-writing process and interrogating characters and how their brands can fit into their lives, I wonder if it goes as far as introducing character traits which would enable the brand to feature, for example, give the title character a streak of environmental friendliness and let him drive a Toyota Prius. He could’ve been driving a Hummer before, but Toyota’s paying more.
The New York Times had an interesting tale of how this all works and this little snippet I found pretty interesting and just reinforces the point I made above.
“‘You’ve written Gray has a Dodge Ram,’ Mr. Yospe began, discussing a character. ‘Does it have to be a Dodge?’
‘What’s wrong with Dodge? What have you got against Dodge?’ said Mr. Orci, a soft-spoken 36-year-old.
The group began debating. In the script, Gray is described as ‘soldier-fit’ but with ‘psychic damage.’ Could someone like that drive, say, a Lincoln Navigator?”
I wonder if this level of intrinsic involvement from brands will affect the quality of the movies being made. It could border on the ridiculous. But, taking a step back, Brands are ideas in themselves. This point was alluded to earlier with the environmentally friendly guy example. Brands have the innate talent of transferring meaning to anything they are associated with. Think Armani and Gucci and you immediately get the meaning and emotion of glamour, now associate them with a character in a movie and some of that glamour rubs off. Get it? So they do play a role in making meaning far more clear simply because brands have spent years and years of advertising making sure that meaning is drilled solid into our thick skulls.
You can imagine that this is particularly useful in movies who need to convey as much meaning as possible, especially when they try to make movies from books and epically fail, most of the time.
And then you get the movies which actually make fun of the entire process and looks at itself and society in general. Cue The Joneses (trailer below). Just watch it and you’ll get the picture. On a similar note though, if anyone has read Jennifer Government, the movie is in production, I am increasingly curious as to how they are going to portray the brands in the movie as they were ripped apart and portrayed as murderous corporate bastards. Google it. It’s going to be brilliant.
Good post Mo. Like the look of your blog too, very slick
that movie looks very insteresting