Page 406 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Product Placement |

digital ProduCt PlaCeMent
With the development of digital editing techniques, product placement no longer even re-
quires the actual presence of the product while filming. Rather, several companies, such as
Marathon Ventures, and CanWest Mediaworks in Canada, now specialize in adding or even
changing products in specific scenes after the fact. Thus, for instance, if you are watching
Will and Grace, the various food or drinks on the characters’ kitchen counter or coffee table
may vary from viewing to viewing. Using this nascent approach, advertisers can capitalize
on popular shows long after they’ve become hits, rather than taking risks on new projects.
Products can also be targeted at specific foreign markets through strategic digital placement
in exported shows.

so with a more critical eye. But because we do not expect the entertaining
movie we are watching to be an advertisement, we may be skeptical about the
commercial messages it contains. Indeed, placement agencies tell clients that as
an advertising strategy, product placement is more persuasive because viewers
do not realize that they are watching commercial messages. Viewers are more
likely to assume that the characters are drinking certain sodas and wearing par-
ticular clothes because they like them, not because the director has cut a deal
with those particular companies. Thus, for instance, many viewers of the teen
drama Dawson’s Creek may have been unaware that the characters’ clothing was
provided through placement deals with American Eagle and J. Crew, or that the
characters’ tastes in music were largely restricted to Dawson’s Creek parent com-
pany Warner Bros.’s music library.

Do you minD?
When placement agencies claim that most people really don’t mind product
placement, one wonders whether it’s because we genuinely “don’t mind” or be-
cause we remain uninformed about how hard people are working behind the
scenes to get those brands before our eyes. One infamous survey done in 1993
by researchers Nebenzahl and Secunda concluded that cinemagoers don’t mind
placement. Their method? Asking people in movie lines whether they would
prefer higher ticket prices instead. There was no third option.
Folks in the industry will claim publicly that they are simply providing real-
ism: we live in a branded world, therefore the world on the screen would actually
look “unreal” if it wasn’t also saturated with brands. Critics of the proliferat-
ing commercialization of the media charge that the persistent claim of added
realism is disingenuous, and point to a variety of counter arguments:

• Placement agencies work to make (or save) money through advertising,
otherwise they’d be called “realism consultants” or some such thing.
• If we look carefully at many, many movies (often older ones) we can see
multiple ways in which scenes have been crafted so as not to emphasize