Movie Product Placement
This past weekend, my wife and I had a "date afternoon" and we decided to watch a movie - truly a rare treat. We both thought the movie was awesome, but we laughed after the show about how blatant and littered the product placement was. Now, don't misunderstand, it was neither cheesy nor did it spoil the experience for us - it was just there and a lot of it. Some of the products included (see if you can guess the movie) - Answer: The Island
Puma - Cadillac - Ben & Jerry's - MSN Search - Aquafina - Amtrak - Cisco - XBox - Nokia - Mack Truck - Michelob - Calvin Klien
I don't know how the movie business works, but is this the de facto way to raise funds? How much does a company a pay to have their logo and futuristic versions of today's products peddled in a movie? And does a Cisco pay more for having their logo displayed and their name voiced on-screen rather than Puma who just had a silent quick-shot?
The first time I was aware of product placement was the O.J. Simpson Trial in 1994 - remember?
When vendors observed that Judge Ito was using a notebook, they made numerous offers of free notebooks. The winner was IBM and its ThinkPad. For some strange reason the IBM logo on the cover was twice the normal size. (InformationWeek, 2/6/95)Funny world we live in, eh?
posted by Stuart Cowen @ 9:00 PM
3 Comments:
There was a lot of nokia placement in Hitchhikers (my first guess) but then most of the other companies are american so it is unlikely to be HH.
My guess is War of the Worlds (which I've not seen yet so could be totally wrong.)
I was warned against wasting theatre money on War of the Worlds, so I haven't seen it either. No, it was The Island. We saw this in favor of Stealth - which we were also told to rent when it hits Blockbuster stores.
thanks, we're probably going to see the Island on wednesday.
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