Product Placement and the "Real World"

Excerpted with permission from Chapter 4 of McLeod, Kembrew (2005) Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (New York: Doubleday), pp.188-197. Also available under a Creative Commons License from www.kembrew.com/books/

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Because our world is saturated with commodities, advertisers argue that product placements in movies and television shows add realism to the production. Compared to our daily lives, though, there's nothing realistic about the way directors place products in the frame or, for that matter, the way products are spoken about. 'I was talking to my friend Jason,' says Illegal Art show curator Carrie McLaren. 'He's a comic, and he sent Comedy Central about seven minutes of him just doing a stand-up routine. And in the stand-up routine he just happens to name a couple of brands, just like it would come up in conversation. And Comedy Central called him back and said, 'We like your stuff, it's really funny, but can you send us something that doesn't have any reference to brands in it, because we can't air it.'

'And that's the thing,' she says. 'We live in a very commercialized, privatized society, and sometimes brand names come up in conversation.' But in a mass media with highly bureaucratized rules of internal conduct, the same kind of talk can't occur without significant editing. 'When you go to make a film, you have to clear any product placement'or any cultural reference,' says Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly. 'I mean, there's attorneys that you hire specifically to protect yourself from getting sued. It's a very long and arduous process.'15

On a cold Iowa winter day in 2004, I found myself eating at the Hamburg Inn diner with famed gross-out director John Waters' whose trademark pencil-thin mustache, I discovered when I sat across from him, is quite real. Waters is responsible for the arthouse classics Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, as well as the PG crowd-pleaser Hairspray. He has worked in both the film underground and the mainstream, and now feels the power that intellectual-property owners exercise over their products. Upon broaching the subject of Hollywood filmmaking and intellectual property, I opened up a torrent of stories and opinions about the 'incredibly stupid' rules he has to deal with. For instance, Waters told me that when filming the 1988 version of Hairspray, Aqua Net refused to allow him to use its hairspray cans in his film. He said to me, 'I always tell young filmmakers, don't ask, because to seek permission is to seek denial.' Conventional companies almost always tell John Waters no, though one of the few corporations that has granted him permission,Waters proudly told me, is Hustler magazine. It's in these permission refusals that advertisers lie when they claim product placements reflect the real world, because the media world adheres to legal-gravitational laws that are anything but natural, that is, unless they are literally referring to MTV's The Real World, which is one of the most heavily product-placed shows on television. Reality television turned out to be an incredibly important vehicle for placement; indeed, Survivor producer Mark Burnett described his show as being 'as much a marketing vehicle as it is a television show.' On Survivor, the contestants will compete for bags of Doritos or an SUV that will be waiting for them when they leave their 'exotic' set location. Burnett continues, 'My shows create an interest, and people will look at them [brands], but the endgame here is selling products in stores'a car, deodorant, running shoes. It's the future of television.'16

Product placement has also crept into MTV videos; for instance, Apple paid to have an iPod prominently framed at the beginning of Mary J. Blige's 'Love @ 1st Sight,' as well as other videos. Music videos now drown in a sea of placements, where advertisers such as Mazda pay to put its new car in a Britney Spears video. Another at- tractive thing for advertisers is that the production-turnaround time for music videos is much shorter than movies, so they can be more reactive to the marketplace. For the most part, the trademarked and copyrighted goods that appear in the fake world do so with the explicit permission (and often payment) of the intellectual-property owners. This is ironic, because in the non-Real World real world, we aren't given the choice of controlling which advertised intellectual properties are shoved in our face when we walk out our doors. Product placement is everywhere in Hollywood films. This practice was kicked off when Reese's Pieces saw a dramatic 66 percent rise in sales after the candy was featured in Steven Spielberg's 1982 film E.T. Following that was the 1983 Tom Cruise vehicle, Risky Business, which set off an explosion in the sale of Ray-Ban sunglasses. Even a movie that makes fun of product placements' Wayne's World, starring Mike Myers and directed by Penelope Spheeris was shaped by a legal-gravitational pull that is more powerful than the filmmaker. 'We had to go through hell to get all the product-placement clearances,' said Spheeris. She was referring to the multitude of products that appear in the movie in ironic ways, such as a scene that parodies a popular mustard commercial from the early 1990s. 'It was so nerve-racking as a director to be like, okay, this is the day we have to shoot the Grey Poupon part. 'Do we have clearance yet, or should we change it to French's mustard?' We were skating by the seat of our pants.'

Most of us associate satire with, well, freedom of expression; genuine satire doesn't require permission from trademark lawyers. Wayne's World was lauded for its ironic, satirical take on consumer culture, but it is satire without any real bite, with no venom. For instance, there's one memorable segment where'wink-wink' Myers's character refuses to shill products in his show-withinthe- film, Wayne's World. 'Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor,' he says as he opens a Pizza Hut box lid, then drinks from a prominently framed can of Pepsi.17

While the gag is funny and seemingly subversive, the companies get to have their cake and eat it, too. Pizza Hut and Pepsi don't mind being included in this parody of product placement because their products have been very notably placed in a 'cool' movie.

If the companies didn't like it, they would have sent their trademark-lawyer attack dogs to stop Spheeris and Myers. The barking of these dogs has made studios overly cautious, something that leads to self-censorship. Such was the case with Raw Deal, a documentary about rape that contained a scene shot at a frat-house party that had music playing. Artisan, the distributor, dropped the project because of music-licensing problems. Joe Gibbons's short film Barbie's Audition is a darkly comic retelling of the age-old Hollywood casting-couch story, and it stars a Barbie doll. The short was originally selected to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, but festival lawyers grew concerned and excluded it from the final festival line-up. In both cases, direct censorship didn't come from intellectual-property owners, but was the result of internal decisions and policies crafted by overcautious organizations. In mass-media art such as motion pictures, a lot of content is dictated by forces external to the production of the art. Associated Film Productions, an agency that helps companies place intellectual properties in movies, brags that it 'carefully controls the appearance of the client's product in films.' For instance, Adidas got what amounted to a commercial shoehorned into Orion's Johnny Be Good. 'It tied in visually so well,' said Orion executive Jan Kean, 'you didn't even know you were seeing a commercial.'18

Product placement can result in terrible, stilted dialogue, such as the following excerpt from Who's Harry Crumb?, where John Candy's character plugs Cherry Coke in a scene with Jim Belushi: candy: Cherry? belushi: No fruit, thank you. candy: Coke? belushi: No, thank you. candy: Mix 'em together, ya got a Cherry Coke. Ah ha ha ha ha ha! A Cherry Coke, ha ha ha ha! The film You've Got Mail seems completely constructed around its cross-marketing tie-ins with AOL and Starbucks.Written by the formerly respected journalist and essayist Nora Ephron, the film was in fact a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's product-free The Little Shop Around the Corner, a sharp and witty romantic comedy of the classic Hollywood era. In Ephron's highly commercialized cinematic remix, the relationship between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan primarily takes place on their AOL e-mail accounts and during their encounters at one of the coffee chain's stores. In one memorable (though completely gratuitous) voice-over, Hanks comments, 'The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee: Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low fat, non fat. . . .'

With its light, incidental music, the whole scene looks and sounds like a commercial for Starbucks. And it is. In terms of plot, however, the most obvious trademarked name'Barnes and Noble' was absent. Hanks's character played the owner of a large corporate bookstore chain that put Ryan's family-owned bookstore out of business. In a motion picture that owed its very existence to recognizable trademarks, wouldn't the obvious name of Hanks's store be Barnes and Noble, especially since Starbucks has partnered with the bookseller in the real world? To use the discourse of productplacing advertisers, wouldn't it add to the film's realism? Of course it would, but I'm sure Barnes & Noble had no desire to be placed in such a negative context.

Then again, You've Got Mail ended up asking the audience to sympathize with Hanks and accept the inevitability of the independent bookstore's death. This is how awful and insidious that film is: Near the end, Ryan discovered that Hanks knew her AOL identity, which meant he had been manipulating her in their cuddly online relationship and in their antagonistic business liaisons. On top of that, his faux Barnes and Noble drove her bookstore out of business, which had been in the family for generations. So what does Ryan do before the credits roll? Melt into Hanks's arms. Why audiences didn't riot at the end is completely beyond me; if ever there was a film that deserved the 'critique of the brick,' it's You've Got Mail. Wayne's World made product placement (or at least 'ironic product placement') cool. By the end of the 1990s, another Mike Myers helmed blockbuster, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, epitomized the new consumer-culture zeitgeist. In this hyperreferential, hyper-commercial movie, Dr. Evil's world headquarters is located atop the Seattle Space Needle, which has been branded with the Starbucks logo.Myers was playing off the widespread idea that the coffee-shop chain is an evil empire that colonizes everything, so it's fitting that Dr. Evil is behind this operation. 'Dr. Evil, several years ago we invested in a small Seattle-based coffee company,' says Robert Wagner's character, Number Two. 'Today, Starbucks offers premium quality coffee at affordable prices. Delish!' The humor here is toothless and faux-subversive, and required the permission of Starbucks.

The release of The Spy Who Shagged Me came bundled in so many cross-marketing tie-ins, it turned the film into little more than a series of vignettes tied together with quasi-commercials for Heineken, Virgin, and other companies. Since Wayne's World, other films have followed its product-saturated lead from playful, knowing movies such as Charlie's Angels to so-totally-not-ironic films such as the Michael Jordan Warner Brothers brand explosion that was Space Jam. Or somewhere in between, like the second Matrix film, where the Wachowski brothers publicist claimed they clamped down on merchandising to avoid any negative Star Wars comparisons. Thus they strictly limited the sequel's ancillary products, Frank Rich sarcastically wrote, to an Enter the Matrix video game, action figures, sunglasses (featured in another TimeWarner magazine, People) and an animated DVD. They kept the movie's product tie-ins to a bare minimum as well: Powerade drinks, Cadillac, Ducati motorcycles and Heineken.19

Although lots of attention gets paid to product placement in film and television, video games occupy the imagination of just as many teens and twentysomethings. These games are important because they seamlessly integrate leisure activity, consumption, and everyday life. This industry did $9.4 billion in business in 2001, and its market share continues to grow, making it a lucrative site to place trademarked products. In her book Branded, Alissa Quart describes the action in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, part of a series of Hawk games that has approached $1 billion in sales since 1999. Skateboarder Tony Hawk maneuvers near a Quiksilver sign. When Hawk melons or lipslides on a thin ramp, the Quiksilver logo is visible again, on his T-shirt. The action moves to Tokyo. When Hawk and his skater pals perform airwalks, they flash past the ubiquitous Quiksilver logo, which is nestled among all the other stickers and bright neon lights and the signs blaring brands such as Nokia and Jeep.20

Unlike most movies, people play video games multiple times and, by definition, they require the close attention of the viewer. This makes it a product placer's dream. Activision, the company that produces the Hawk game, claims that advertisers who place their logo in a Tony Hawk game get one billion 'quality brand impressions'the millions of teen and twentysomething gamers. It allows players to outfit their virtual characters from a selection of brand-name shirts, shoes, and other gear. The branding virus has infected popular music as well. A study of 2003 Top 20 radio hits found hundreds of brand-name references littered throughout the songs. 'It's about using brands as metaphors,' San Francisco marketing expert Lucian James told Billboard. 'Globally, when you say Gucci, people know exactly what you mean.' While companies don't mind the often-free advertising provided by pop-music artists, they don't like it when their trademarks are used for satirical purposes. But as I mentioned in the last chapter, a court ruled in favor of the Swedish pop group Aqua when Mattel sued over their song 'Barbie Girl.' Mercedes, the most popular trademark in the 2003 popscape, had 112 references in the Billboard Top 20, while Cadillac and Lexus were mentioned 46 and 48 times, respectively. (An inspired lyric from R. Kelly: 'The way you do the things you do / reminds me of my Lexus, cool / That's why I'm all up in your grill.') In just one song by Lil' Kim, 'The Jump Off,' she mentions Bacardi, Barbie, Bulgari, Ferrari, Bentleys, Hummers,. Cadillac, Escalade, Jaguar, Timberland, Sprite, Playboy, Range Rover, and Brooklyn Mint. After Busta Rhymes's song 'Pass the Courvoisier' spent twenty weeks on the charts, worldwide sales of Courvoisier rose 20 percent. Lucian James said that there are generally three reasons why artists mention a particular brand: They actually like the product; they hope to get free goods; or, increasingly, they have struck a strategic deal. Unlike Hollywood, the authenticity-obsessed world of music'especially hip-hop remains tight-lipped about this issue. 21

All this isn't to say that youth marketers are abandoning movie product placements; it's just that they are now considered to be but one component in a larger attempt to colonize the consciousness of kids. Dogtown and Z-Boys, a 2001 documentary about skateboarding, was financed by the skate accessory company Vans, and it functions as a very cleverly cloaked commercial. What at first glance looks like a historical documentary about the birth of anti-authoritarian skate culture turns out to be something else. After watching a number of carefully edited shots, you can't help but notice the relatively constant presence of Vans on the feet of the skaters. Because it's a documentary a genre associated with 'truth' and 'transparency' Dogtown successfully solidifies the association between skate culture and the company. When I grew up in the skate and surf town of Virginia Beach during the 1980s, I was well aware of the existence of Vans heck, I even owned a checkerboard pair, just like Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. But the way the brand is so often placed in the frame, Dogtown and Z-Boys creates a false or exaggerated kind of impression of their ubiquity. We really try to connect emotionally with the kids and find new ways of doing things,' says Jay Wilson, vice president of marketing at Vans. Speaking about the film, Wilson notes, 'We're getting more public relations on this thing than we ever imagined.22

In the 1990s Vans dramatically raised its profile and expanded its market share by sponsoring The Vans Warped Tour, the punk-and-extremesports summer festival. It was a smart move, and financing Dogtown further solidified its reputation as the official outfitter of disenfranchised youth, one of the arbiters of over-the-counter culture cool.

Increasingly, our cultural activities are tied up with carefully researched and marketed products and services. There's an interesting kind of synergy happening when people can play a Tony Hawk video game, watch the X Games on ESPN, take in an extremesports- and-punk-rock concert at the local stop of the Warped Tour, drive to the mall and buy Quiksilver gear, eat an Extreme Taco Bell meal at the food court, and check out Dogtown at the multiplex' all without ever having to skateboard once.When I was growing up not that long ago, the consumption options that now surround skateboarding simply didn't exist. It pretty much cost nothing (save for the board's price tag) to hang out and skate in a parking lot while a boom box played Black Flag. Now skateboarding is a crossmarketing dream or nightmare, depending on your point of view' or the contents of your stock portfolio.

Last edited February 26, 2006