Movie Mapper: The Brand Hype Database (v1.1.9.0)

Welcome to Brand Hype (www.brandhype.org), a new web resource designed to foster informed debate about product placement in the movies. You'll find placement examples in the Gallery, lots of articles listed in the Bibliography, a discussion forum, and a critical video all about product placement called Behind the Screens. The key feature of the site is Movie Mapper.

This is Movie Mapper, Brand Hype's searchable database of product placements in the movies, which we began building in early 2005. Visitors can search by actor, film title, brandname, etc, to get a full list of product appearances drawn from this growing list of movies. (Try typing in the first few letters of the brand or movie title you're interested in.) Movie Mapper has been designed so that anyone with questions about product placement, including students, teachers, journalists, media literacy advocates and media researchers can use it and add to it. Potential questions could be, for example: '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.)

In time, the quality of information available through Movie Mapper will increase, as more movies are logged and added to the database (as at February 2006, we have over 100 individual movies fully listed). Since we're a shoestring operation, we need help from folks like you to make Movie Mapper really fly. If you would like to contribute to the building of Movie Mapper by logging movies we haven't already included, please email us to get signed up. Ultimately, we want to provide tools that will allow you to visually map, for example, the patterns of studio ownership to brandname products, or the frequency of placements over the duration of a movie in a particular genre, using the data held in Movie Mapper.

Please make frequent use of Movie Mapper, take a look around the site, spread the word about Brand Hype, and consider helping us build its content.

The Brand Hype team