Product placement and the Oscars

Informed debate about the ever-escalating marketing ploy of plugging brandname products and services in movies, TV shows and video games has summarily failed to keep pace with the staggering growth of this dubious practice, which a recent industry report estimated is now worth US$3.5 billion (PQ Media). However, there was reason for cautious optimism this past month with the joint announcement by two of Hollywood's biggest unions that the practice has got out of hand. The Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild stated, in part, that "The so-called debate occurring today is actually a one-sided how-to seminar featuring the conglomerates who control the media and the companies who place products."

It's hard to disagree with this statement. For example, Advertising Age, via its 'branded entertainment' spin-off Madison+Vine, crows endlessly about the success of specific placements, even imaginary ones (eg the fictional Adidas 'Team Zissou' sneakers in The Life Aquatic); how some companies use placement as a way to demonstrate new and unfamiliar products (eg Cisco's new video phones in The Island); and, how actors apparently have too much veto power. Anyone foolish enough to question the practice is usually told that a) placements are just there to provide realism in movies, or b) most people really don't mind placements as long as they're done unobtrusively. The first statement is nothing more than a pretext; the second is only backed up by the affirmative science of marketing research: peer-reviewed journal articles concluding, for example, that people don't like to see fake products in movies, or that "consumers" really don't mind product placement. (In the latter case, the methodology involved approaching people waiting in movie lines and asking them if they'd prefer placements or higher ticket prices. (1))

Omnicom's international branding company Interbrand has a website called Brand Channel that claims to be 'The world's only online exchange about branding'. Brand Channel's 'debate' section is apparently a place where one can "Argue, bicker, squabble or just give us a piece of your mind." The topics of debate, however, are decided upon by Brand Channel, and are clearly heavily edited. They're also decidedly trivial: "Do the big fashion houses need a celebrity designer in the lead?"; "Is eBay unstoppable?"; "What can drug companies do to improve their image?" Brand Channel has a section on product placement called brandcameo, which lists placements in selected movies since 2001. So, might placement actually be a problem? Hardly: "Minority Report from 2002 is one of the most cited films with regard to product placement, and it only had 19 brands." (Only?) Brand Channel (remember, these are reputedly the cleverest branding guys in the world) also had the bright idea of looking for brandnames in documentaries - as if they're somehow comparable to movies. They reveal that Farenheit 9/11, for example, has 54 brands in it, including Halliburton. Breathlessly, they ask: "Were they placed?" Maybe it doesn't matter, since "We simply live in a branded world and documentaries reflect that reality." (Brand Channel)

What's missing, then, is an informed, sustained debate - one which could do worse than start with the work of Robert W. McChesney, who, like Ben Bagdikian before him, argues forcefully and convincingly that culture and democracy are suffering as a result of continual media mergers. In his compelling book Rich Media, Poor Democracy (2000), McChesney points out that product placement is, like every other kind of 'ad creep', just one among many symptoms of 'hypercommercialism'. SAG and the WGA are absolutely right to argue that this is an issue that can attributed to media conglomeration. (Whether they care first and foremost about kids being exposed to covert advertising, or are actually more frustrated at being locked out of a multi-billion dollar business practice - as at least one unnamed industry source has already suggested - remains to be seen.)

A brief review of this year's Oscar contenders for best movie (more to come on this issue very soon) provides a microcosm of this dubious practice. Good Night and Good Luck is an historical parable about the troubled relationship between editorial, 'corporate', and advertising at CBS. Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and his producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) have to contend with heat from above, and the whims of sponsors (Alcoa) and advertisers (Kent cigarettes) as they press ahead with an unflinching expose of McCarthyism. Crash features many brands (perhaps rationalized as appropriate because it is a contemporary urban tale), while Brokeback Mountain follows a more restrained, but no less revealing, pattern: the characters clearly drink Budweiser, and the bars serve it too - if Bud's ubiquitous, red neon 'bow tie' signage is any indication. Towards the end of the movie we see Heath Ledger's character slouched over his apple pie in a Greyhound bus station; his former girlfriend glides by, only to stop in front of a massive, shiny Coke dispensing machine. Here, the trail is not hard to follow: Focus Features is owned by Universal, which has several deals going with Coke.

Intriguingly, the Pepsi logo also appears in Brokeback Mountain, when Jake Gyllenhaal's character is cruising for sex in the red light district of a small Mexican town. This kind of negative placement also crops up in the Costa-Gavras movie Missing: the victims of a Latin-American military coup are herded at gunpoint into a football stadium, past several big shiny Pepsi machines; later, Jack Lemmon's character holds up a bottle of Coke, label to the camera, for a toast 'a la vida' or 'to life'. (Columbia was owned by Coca-Cola when Missing was made; these clips can be seen in Behind the Screens.) In this year's Capote, Truman is repeatedly seen in the company of a bottle of J&B scotch whisky (more often, in fact, than he's seen with his partner, Jack Dunphy), though not nearly as often as Tom Hanks' character is seen with FedEx in the runaway product-placement caper Cast Away.

The evidence available suggests that product placement has a significant effect on the kinds of stories that get told through this beloved medium, since viable scripts must be ever more amenable to placement opportunities. Placement is in some ways just a symptom of a larger problem, but it is a vividly illustrative example that serves very well as a starting point to animate discussions about underlying causes. That said, the future belongs to the branders, to ad creep, to hypercommercialism - unless informed, critical debate can be fostered around these issues.

References

1. Nebenzahl, Israel D. & Secunda, E. "Consumers' attitudes toward product placement in movies." International Journal of Advertising 12(1) (Wntr 1993), pp. 1-12

Posted by Matt Soar, Mar 9, 2006