POINT: Don’t Believe The Hype

By Sam

The problem with people is that they’re easily suggestible. We really have absolutely no clue what we want in life, except for perhaps a family, a home, and a nice American-made car. And really, with that, we’d be fairly content. But that doesn’t work for the advertising industry, because if we were just content with the status quo, we’d never need excellent products to help lift our sprits (and members) like Zoloft and Prozac and Cialis.

With the FCC and other various government agencies telling companies what they can and can’t say in advertisements for their products, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find out about revolutionary weight loss cures or sodas that actually burn calories. So advertisers have had to turn to product placement, which is a fancy way of saying that you show celebrities using products that you too should be using.

Movies feature actors drinking a particular type of beer, or driving a certain car, or even something innocuous like using Tide Coldwater, in order to cut down on their hot water bill, as well as extend the life of their clothing. But the problem is that we Americans as a society blindly follow whatever trend we think everyone else is following. Just because you see Jude Law brewing a nice hot espresso using the Briel MultiPro Prestige Fully Automatic Espresso Machine with a Turbo Jet Frother and exclusive thermo block technology, does not mean that your dependable, reliable, Mr. Coffee 12 cup programmable coffee maker is no good (Trust me, I know first hand, it is!). But, as I said, we’re a weak race, and it’s already hard enough to resist a great deal on Husky Hand Tools, available only at the Home Depot, when we see a Sunday circular, never mind when we see Tony Stewart driving his beautiful orange #20 Home Depot Chevy Impala at scenic Watkins Glen.

Not only is it underhanded, but it’s also intrusive. For example, during the 2007 baseball playoffs on FOX, instead of a normal screen wipe, a Transformers movie title would flash. Now granted, Transformers is a great piece of cinema, but it had no relation to anything else in the FOX broadcast. It was an artificially created spot for product placement where none should have been, and it detracted from the overall professional feel of the telecast. Nintendo Wii.

I suppose the only solution is to fight back. So what if people playing video games in TV shows tend to drink Mountain Dew? It doesn’t really give you that much of a pick me up, unless of course it’s new Mountain Dew Game Fuel, specifically formulated for those long Halo 3 sessions. We as consumers need to detach art from reality, and realize that when a movie or TV show or celebrity is showing a product in a covert way, they’ve got an agenda, and they’re laughing all the way to the Bank of America, which, I might add, has terrific customer service.

COUNTERPOINT: AT&T Phone Home

By Kevin

Remember E.T.?

There’s a scene in the movie where Elliot makes a trail of candy to lure the alien out of the closet. Remember the type of candy that he used?

M&Ms? Nope. Skittles? Hardly. The candy in question was, of course, Reese’s Pieces. This is one of the more famous examples of product placement in feature films. There have been many other examples since, but E.T. stands out in my memory for being the most obvious.

In the glory days of black and white television, companies sponsored entire shows. You’d have Kraft Cheese Variety Magic Hour. General Electric’s Sunshine Station Rainbow Show. In slightly more subtle moments, newscasters would take a 2-minute break – live, on air – to puff a Lucky Strike.

No one questioned the marriage of commerce and entertainment when families got together to warm themselves by the electric glow of the television set. Over time, the advertisements slipped away from the spotlight and found shelter in small nooks and crannies. Product placement, not product sponsorship, was the new name of the game.

Most often, these things go unnoticed. The camera will linger for an extra second on a Pepsi can or a BMW logo, but that’s usually the extent of it. There’s no harm or foul play involved; the filmmakers get financial support and audiences get a more relevant movie experience. There is a case to be made about commingling art and corporate sponsorships, but in the vast majority of instances the mediums in which the product placements occur aren’t claiming to be work of art.

The reality of the entertainment industry is that it can be incredibly expensive to produce the content that we enjoy. Sometimes it’s necessary to partner with an established company to get things off the ground. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing as long as the products are kept where they belong: somewhere within the story’s peripheral vision, not center stage.

In the case of E.T., product placement can make a movie even more memorable. Did scores of moviegoers rush to the store and blindly buy pounds of Reese’s Pieces in 1982? No, of course not. But if they happen to be in store deciding between Reese’s and M&Ms, and recall a scene from a movie they enjoyed involving one of the other, what’s the big deal?