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Welcome to the newly relaunched Brand Hype website! Brand Hype is an educational resource all about product placement in Hollywood movies. You'll also find articles and book excerpts, news, references, and a classroom video full of real examples and interviews called Behind the Screens.
The most important innovation on Brand Hype is our database, which contains details on every single brand appearance in over 200 well-known movies. This is accessible in several ways: From the menu above you can see a list of all the movies we've logged so far. Or the most branded movies; or the most branded characters. Using the Visualizer, you can select a movie from the database and create a visual map of all the brands it contains - in three different ways. Finally, advanced users can access the database directly (via the Brand Hype API).
The Brand Hype database has been designed so that anyone with questions about product placement, including students, teachers, journalists, media literacy advocates and media researchers can ask questions such as: "which movies feature Chevrolet cars?" (Answer: We have 9 listed so far, including A Beautiful Mind, The Clearing, Constantine, Sin City, etc.); or, "How many times did Fed Ex actually appear in Cast Away?" (Answer: 56 times.)
The Brand Hype team (Matt, Gabriel, Ryan)
Resources
- Product Placement Bibliography
- I'm There Too
- Hollywood: The Ad
- Expanding the Industry
- Brand Hype: Filmography
News
- David Lynch on Product Placement
- Hollywood box office slump
- Call for Papers - SCMS (Vancouver, March 2006)
- Genres, periods, and Willie Wonka.
The Brand Hype project was conceived in 2004 and is directed by Dr. Matt Soar, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal.
Current site redevelopment by Gabriel Gosselin under the direction of Matt Soar, with assistance from Ryan Cadrette.
Past team members: Lesley Husbands; Stuart Thiel; Danielle Devereaux; Fernando Aloise.
The redevelopment of Brand Hype has been funded by a small grant from the Office of the Vice President, Research & Graduate Studies, Concordia University. Brand Hype was originally made possible by a Research/Creation in the Fine Arts grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and is the sister project of Logo Cities (which itself led to The Montreal Signs Project).