What is product placement and how does it work?
In one of the most remembered scenes of the nineties cinema. John Connor flees through the corridors of a shopping center pursued by a police officer and a killer robot from the future played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The tension, although ruined by the trailers, was that we did not know which of the two men was sent to protect the leader of the resistance, but many do not remember that there is another character in that scene: the poor guy who is in half of the fight after going to buy a delicious and cold Pepsi Diet. Clear example of product placement.
Product placement is a resource that brands use more and more.
Being riddled by an emotionless cybernetic organism moments after purchasing your product does not seem like the basis of any good commercial, but the drink machine that appears in the scene is one of the clearest examples of product placement. An advertising technique that consists of introducing brands into fictions such as movies, series, video clips or even video games.
Faced with a changing market and an audience that no longer sits in front of the television every night to watch commercial breaks, companies have moved to the place where the eyes of their potential customers are most attentive.
Productions benefit from including them in their programs because they obtain great benefits that help reduce costs and also “enhance realism”, since in the real world we are also surrounded by advertising. The result is a platform where filmmakers and companies help each other, since some get money to make big blockbusters that will be seen by millions of people and others get several seconds of prominence that can help increase their sales.
We could divide advertising by placement into four categories:
Passive:
Where the products appear in the background of a scene and the characters do not interact with them. This could be billboards seen in a street scene or clearly identifiable markings of cars crossing the road. It could be shop windows, the ads stuck on the bus windows, the aforementioned Pepsi machine from Terminator 2 (or World War Z) or the famous Coca-Cola ad used in the movie Blade Runner.
Activa:
Where the characters interact with the object but don’t mention the name. This is usually the most common and we can see it in almost all movies and series, especially in such basic aspects as being able to recognize the brands of the CSI protagonists’ mobile phones, the Ray-Bans that Tom Cruise made fashionable in Risky Business, the Apple Store where Captain America and the Black Widow take refuge in The Winter Soldier, the Coca-Cola with which Walter White enjoys his moment of triumph when buying his former boss’s car wash, the computer laptop with which Jeff Goldblum stops the alien invasion of Independence Day and the hundreds of examples that populate the cinema of Michael Bay.
transformers a very long ad
The Transformers saga is actually a very long and expensive advertisement where everything is advertised: From Burger King, the Panasonic memory cards that show the camera before using them, the truck with the Furbys advertisement that the autobots use as a barricade, the cans of Bud Light from which Mark Whalberg helps himself in the midst of the destruction of the city, the dozens of Chinese companies that appeared in the fourth installment, all the brands of cars used in the filming (the same applies to James Bond ) and even one of the most infamous moments when Stanley Tucci shows how Transformers can turn into any object by asking “Do you like music?” and putting the famous Beats by Dre in the foreground for ten seconds. The same ones that can also be seen in Coldplay’s recent Adventure of a Lifetime video clip.
It’s a very profitable technique that in some cases, like Man of Steel, helped bring in a whopping $160 million, but it also runs the risk of reducing a movie to a blatant advertisement like the Audi Will Smith drives in I, Robot (would also make an appearance in “vintage 2004” converse).
When mentioning this type of publicity it is always remembered how the Mars company rejected Steven Spielberg’s use of M&Ms in ET, making the director use the Reese’s Pieces brand for the scene in which Elliott places candy on the floor to attract the little alien towards his room, and that meant a real boom for the company.
And the same could be said of Mister Potato from Toy Story or the magic blackboard that became a sensation among children in 1995 when they saw her draw a revolver at full speed. Although these two objects should belong to the next category, since in reality everything we see in Toy Story is a product placement of the toys related to the movie. The balance is found in Forrest Gump, where the sneakers, the drinks and all the other brands are identifiable elements of American history and are overlooked by the viewer, identifying them, like the rest of the film’s guest appearances, as cultural references.
Active with mention:
Here a clear mention is made of the product shown on the screen, or the name of the brand is introduced in a conversation. The most famous is the talk about McDonald’s that Jules and Vincent Vega have in Pulp Fiction. Or the mentions of cornettos in Shaun of the Dead and the rest of the Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost trilogy. Also the mentions of Pepsi or the DeLorean in Return to the futurelike the Nikes that Marty McFly takes to the Wild West.
There is a very fine line that separates it from surreptitious advertising because the brands appear as necessary elements within the plot, without reaching the next point on the list. That’s what happens in Demolition Man, where we’re informed that every restaurant in the world became Pizza Hut after a franchise war. The best thing is to discover that in the United States they took advantage of the fact that Taco Bell was a much better-known brand to digitally change all the signs of the movie and thus charge twice for the same platform. There is a sign that was never changed due to carelessness and that can be searched as a curiosity.
Active with allusion:
Here there is no doubt that they are trying to sell us a product and they do whatever it takes to make us notice their presence. When the Fringe series was on a tightrope, mobile phone companies came to its rescue by suddenly making brands and models widely mentioned and displayed.
The same would happen in his last season with electric cars. Where they would even mention how cheap they were. Praising a product’s qualities sometimes leads us right into the realm of parody, like when Verizon Wireless introduces the Indominus Rex or the scene in Wayne’s World where Mike Myers assures that he will never sell himself to anyone… as he pulls out boxes of Pizza Hut, Doritos, Reebok clothes, aspirin and a can of Pepsi reciting some slogan.
The result is that you don’t know if they are parodying the way to sell themselves or not. Those who have discovered that H&S shampoo is used to kill aliens will understand. From time to time the product placement is too cheeky.
The United States Army uses this product placement technique to get young people to enlist in its ranks
Apart from trademarks. The United States military has benefited greatly from its collaboration with the cinema. They are involved on a regular basis providing advice in search of the most realism possible and also access to warships, fighter planes and military personnel.
Top Gun inspired hundreds of young people to join the air force after seeing Tom Cruise as a pilot. And that is the reason why, once again, the Transformers saga appears in this article. Showing us the interior of combat planes and the well-oiled war machine of the country, always at the service of freedom and North American interests. As if that were not enough, in one of the films Shia Labeouf’s character is told “now you are a soldier”, as if they needed to make their role as a recruitment announcement even more clear.
But one film that fits into all product placement categories is Tom Hanks’ Castaway. A peculiar tape because it not only confirms the great talent of its protagonist. Rather, he manages to turn inanimate objects into characters whose fate matters to us while he puts his marks in front of us. This is the case of the Wilson brand volleyball, which ends up becoming Hanks’ only friend and a memorable merchandising item.
The final step is to discover how the entire film, which tells the story of a parcel worker who ends up on an island after a plane crash, ends up returning to civilization and, on his own, taking the orders to their original recipients. Because nothing stops FEDEX.
