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Product placement is so ubiquitous that it hardly needs an explanation — the embedding of brands into media that are usually ad-free. It’s hardly a new phenomenon, happening as early as 1873, in Jules Verne’s Around The World in 80 Days, but it has experienced a real evolution. Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future notoriously showed Pepsi as the drink of the future, while Sam Mendes’ upcoming Bond 23 will break records, raking in 1/3 of it’s $135,000,000 budget from product placement.
It can range from the painfully contrived, such as this recent Hawaii 5-0 clip, to the iconic, like the Reese’s Pieces in Spielberg’s E.T. (Fun fact: M&M’s famously declined to be included in the film, citing reservations about the plot.
But just like anything, technology is changing things. What inspired me to re-visit this oft-cited facet of advertising was the relatively new process of inserting new ads into re-runs. The “Big 3″ networks in the United States have begun to sell ad space in their re-aired TV programs. You can see an ad for Kevin James’ auteuristic art-house film Zookeeper in this episode of How I Met Your Mother, originally aired in 2007. I’m generally pretty ambivalent about product placement, especially because I think an increasingly media-literate audience is able to recognize it, but I find something particularly sinister about this method specifically. It’s like advertisers aren’t able to leave the past well enough alone, they’re trying to time-travel advertise. That coupled with the glaring continuity error of advertising a new movie in an episode I know to be a re-run feels like an affront to my intelligence. That being said, I won’t really be bothered until Chiquita forks over the dough to re-brand the Banana Stand in old Arrested Development episodes.
So what do you think? Is product placement a necessary, even beneficial part of the marketing mix, or is it concentrated evil?
Derek Jensen
January 23, 2012 @ 1:36 pm
In the context of the product placement in previously aired programs I think that the concept of product placement for marketing is misused.
Product placement is to set trends or establish a sense of understanding into the pop culture world during that time, that scene, and in that specific program. In many ways this is how brands create and establish a following.
But, when product placement is portrayed as just another marketing scheme that can be altered the benefits of product placement in current and new programs become gray.
Product placement is good when it isn’t abused to create a false representation of what is truly going on in that scene.