Page 403 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Product Placement

insert your CoMPany’s Cigarette here
“As discussed, I guarantee that I will use Brown & Williamson tobacco products in no less
than five feature films. It is my understanding that Brown & Williamson will pay a fee of
$500,000.00.” From a letter dated April 28, 1983, signed by movie actor Sylvester Stallone
and addressed to Associated Film Promotion, Los Angeles. (Legacy Tobacco Documents
Library, University of California, San Francisco)

industry in just a few years? Is it merely about adding “realism” to all of these
media products, as the industry routinely claims? Or is placement perhaps a
stealth way of advertising to distracted or impressionable audiences? What
can the phenomenal growth of product placement tell us about the state of our
media and entertainment systems?
In an ever more crowded commercial media environment, advertisers and
their agencies must continually search for more effective ways of reaching
their target audiences. Indeed, they refer to this self-generated crowding as “ad
clutter”: a cacophony of advertising messages that is so busy and so overwhelm-
ing, it’s increasingly difficult to reach target audiences without the distraction of
other competing commercial messages. Many in the advertising industry have
become disenchanted with conventional advertising methods, such as TV and
radio commercials, because viewers can skip, zip, zap, or TiVo their way around
these messages.
Product placement offers a way to sidestep this issue by putting the ad mes-
sage inside the media content it would otherwise bookend. The growing use of
digital video recorders (DVRs) ensures that more products and ad slogans will
be incorporated into popular TV programs. Added benefits for advertisers in-
clude the enviable and often exclusive association with a celebrity, an “event”
movie, or a hit TV show; and the recurrent and expanding exposure brought
by syndication, repeats, reruns, cable, DVD, international distribution, and so
forth.

FiLms

An increasing trend toward product placement is also found in film produc-
tion. The economic benefits of using placement are substantial. One reason is
that some of the massive production costs associated with filmmaking can be
significantly offset by cutting deals with advertisers to feature their products: ei-
ther the advertiser pays handsomely to have their product appear in the movie,
or the producers save substantially by having interested advertisers provide
props, uniforms, trucks, even entire sets. Product placement in films once took
the form of side deals between props managers and advertisers, with the former
agreeing to add a product to a scene in return for a small amount of money, but
the practice is now carefully coordinated by studios, and a potentially lucrative
business. Indeed, carefully negotiated deals can save movie productions millions