Page 404 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Product Placement |

ProduCt PlaCeMent tiMeline

1982—E.T. features Reece’s Pieces. Sales jump 65 percent.
1984—U.S. product placement (all media): $512 million.
1992—Wayne’s World: Draped in Reebok clothes and waving Pizza Hut boxes around,
Wayne declares: “Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor.” Ironic? Sure. Fabu-
lously targeted placement? Absolutely.
1993—The Firm: Gene Hackman to Tom Cruise: “Grab a Red Stripe.” Sales in the U.S. go
up 50 percent.
1994—U.S. product placement (all media): $1.13 billion.
1999—“BMW gave us a lot of money if we put their car in the movie. So we did.” John
Schwartzman, Director of Photography, Armageddon; “We used a TAG Heuer big
clock, and I put that little TAG logo there and it saved me $75,000.” Michael Bay,
Director, Armageddon (commentary tracks, special edition DVD).
2000—Cast Away features 56 appearances of the FedEx logo. A FedEx spokesperson
says, “We’re a character in this movie.”
2004—U.S. product placement (all media): $3.5 billion.
2009—U.S. product placement (all media): $6.9 billion (projected).

“A Product Placement Hall of Fame,” BusinessWeek, http://www.businessweek.com/1998/25/b3583062.
htm; “Product Placement Spending in Media 2005,” (PQ Media); Gettelman, E., and David Gilson, “Ad Nau-
seam: Madison Avenue is Scrambling to Stick Ads Anywhere It Can, from Children’s Books to Bathroom
Stalls,” Mother Jones, Jan./Feb. 2007.

of dollars. One recent deal involved the placement of one vintage Coca-Cola
glass in a period scene in a movie about Bob Dylan. In return for this placement,
Coca-Cola agreed to provide all the soda for the entire crew and cast for the du-
ration of the production—a saving in the order of tens of thousands of dollars.
Such economic benefits further ensure that priority will often be given to dia-
logue, scenes, and entire scripts that lend themselves most readily to product place-
ment. It also means viewers can expect to see more advertising inside movies—not
just workaday “mainstream” comedies and romances (which are often positively
saturated with placements—think of “star vehicles” for actors such as Tom Hanks
and Adam Sandler, with Hanks’s Cast Away providing one of the garish examples
of product placement by raising FedEx to the level of virtual co-star), but also in
the work of more “serious” directors.

hisTory

The movies were recognized as a potential advertising medium very early
on. In a book published in 1916 titled Advertising by Motion Pictures, the author
Ernest A. Dench wrote: “It will probably seem rather strange to you that an in-
vention like the cinematograph, which has achieved widespread fame as a form
of entertainment, can perform the functions of advertising, but it is none the less