h a l f b a k e r yThere goes my teleportation concept.
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Lately, I've noticed that Lucent phones have been getting some play, most laptops are Apples and Starbucks isn't doing to bad. (In the only episode I caught of the most recent survivor, I noticed the nurse sported a PRADA hat. High-end roughing it?) |
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Very good. Maybe there should be an Oscar for product
placement. It did seem odd in Bridget Jones' Diary that
*everyone* had Apple computers. |
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The latest thing in product placement seems to be retroactively inserting products into syndicated reruns with digital video editing techniques. I'm not particularly concerned about the artistic integrity of "The Brady Bunch," but I'm troubled by the precedent this sets. |
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So there should probably be an "Unmitigated Gall" category. |
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How about an award for movie placement in commercials? A commercial for Heineken <yuk> beer has what claims to be a bit from the movie Swordfish with John Travolta, a bunch of 'do me now' looking women, and a beer. It starts off with 'The most exciting sequence from Swordfish'. |
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And an award for the most effective follow-on linking of an advertisement with events in the immediately preceding show. |
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What's the word the industry would coin for it? The Entrainment Award; The Echoing Ad Award?? |
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Ah. I've got it : "The Entertrainment Award"; just one letter sneaked in. |
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Describes the entire advertising industry really. |
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Product placement is a tiny part of the entertraining that's happening to all of us. |
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The movie "A Knight's Tale" wins my vote for having the only product (well, logo) placement that ever made me laugh. |
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Has anyone seen the Van Damme/Dennis Rodman powerhouse Double Team? That would get a big shiny award for having that unbelievable finale involving an explosion and several Coke machines. |
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What Apple's doing is effective though. You can always identify an IMac or Powerbook. I don't think anyone looks at a PC in a movie and thinks to themselves: "Hey! That's a Compaq with 128megs of RAM powered by an Intel Celeron!" |
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And the Apple machines (post 1998, or whenever they started introducing the curvy translucent stuff) are certainly a lot more visually interesting. If I'm designing a scene I'm going to go for the interesting-looking machines, unless I'm trying to evoke a drab institutional atmosphere. |
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(The movie _Flatliners_ showed a NeXT cube in one guy's apartment. Same principle, I assume.) |
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re rayfo's entertrainment: The worst intentional example I can remember was at the end of each airing of the PBS documentary, "The Civil War." After the closing credits each night, there was a GM logo (or some other manufacturer, but I think it was GM), and a voice-over of the words "The Civil War was brought to you by General Motors." |
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Like I'm going to rush out and buy a car to reward the company that claims to have caused the U.S. Civil War. |
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Best excuse for product placement has to be Blade Runner, where the giant adverts for all your favourite multinationals were actually a feature of the world being portrayed.
But I'm with Mephista on this one. Perhaps we should just burn the person responsible for the most crass bit of product placement each year. |
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Brought to you by Kingsford Charcoal, of course. |
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I think the reason that apples appear so often in movies and TV is they are used in the industries more. Which means at the end of filming there is this Apple with nowhere to go and someone high up in the production will take kindly to the newly orphaned top of the range laptop and give it a good home.
Just a thought, ask me about my Eldorado (uk soap) theory. |
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Nomination for favourite product placement: During Zoolander right after the freak gasoline fight accident, the explosion fills the screen and for only a millisecond a Starbucks cup is thrown like shrapnel towards the camera. Almost borders on the Subliminal.. |
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