Disinformation » product placement

Product Placement Reaches New Heights

JacobSloan — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:38:03 +0000

Wondering how out of control product placement in film has gotten? Check out this reel of highlights from The Marine, a crappy Twentieth Century Fox action flick from a couple years ago which apparently stars Miller Genuine Draft. It points to an emerging form of cinema — the low-quality, low-budget Hollywood movie that serves as an extended two-hour commercial.

Television Networks Rewrite History Through Product Placement

JacobSloan — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 16:45:24 +0000

There sure is a lot of time traveling on television these days. The Consumerist provides an example of the subtly unsettling practice of messing with cinematic/cultural/TV continuity by digitally inserting advertisements from the present into old shows and movies. Just wait until they start slipping “Zookeeper” billboards into footage of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or Nazi stadium rallies:

For the past few years, networks have been digitally inserting ads and product placements for new products into old reruns. Shannon just noticed one in a rerun of a 2007 episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” In the background on the shelf is a magazine with an ad on the back for the new “Zookeeper” starring Kevin James.

2012: The Year Product Placement Will Destroy All Integrity in Movies

majestic — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:06:09 +0000

I (almost) promise this will be my last post about 2012 … did anyone else notice the product placement in Roland Emmerich’s disaster-fest? Ryan Sager is all bent out of shape about it, at True/Slant:

I won’t be giving away too much to tell you that 2012 involves one of the most ludicrous seeming product placements in movie history: The hero’s 7-year-old daughter wearing Huggies Pull-Ups. The pull-ups problem is introduced in the first act (and, if you see a gun in the first act…). They don’t appear in the second act. But — and truly, I’m not giving anything away here, I don’t think, but possible spoiler alert — the Huggies Pull-Ups end up featuring in the last two lines of the movie, which go roughly as such:

Annoying 7-year-old daughter: I don’t need Pull-Ups anymore!

The insufferable John Cusack: Nice!

That’s the end of the movie. Trillions of dollars worth of special effects. Years of people’s lives making this movie. And it ends with a non sequitur (there has been no character development of the daughter to justify this line) about diapers.

What’s the deal? Presumably product placement (though I can’t find any news stories confirming it). Regardless of this particular instance, though, we all know that product placement has become rife in movies and TV (TV especially needs it these days, with people fast-forwarding through DVR’d commercials). Product placement is a running meta-joke on “30 Rock.” It’s a non-joke on most every other show.

But does it work?

One team took a look, in this study (abstract), “The Effectiveness of Brand Placements in the Movies: Levels of Placements, Explicit and Implicit Memory, and Brand-Choice Behavior.” Cognitive Daily takes a look:

Moonhee Yang and David Roskos-Ewoldsen showed 373 students from the University of Alabama one of 15, 20-minute movie clips taken from major Hollywood films. Around the middle of each clip was a single product placement of interest. These products had been pre-selected by a preference panel to be roughly equally appealing. Another panel assessed the importance of the product in the movie’s storyline by placing it in one of three categories: Background (not important to story), Used by Character, and Story Connection (meaning the product was actually related to the plot of the movie). This table lists all the products and films in the study:

[more at True/Slant]