Page 407 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Product Placement

labels, signs, and logos. Directors are highly inventive, visual people: they
can choose not to focus in on the logo on the hood of the car; not to make
the actors turn their soda cans to camera, and so on. Indeed, placement
often renders scenes unrealistic, as when multiple scenes from television’s
Frasier ensure that the package of Pepperidge Farm’s Milano cookies are
magically pointing label-out in each of three camera angles.
• Generic, “no-name,” or even invented brands have long been a part of the
make-believe of the movies and television, the job of set dressers and prop
masters; although the placement experts would have us believe otherwise,
it seems hard to imagine moviegoers or television viewers leaving the
theater or turning off the television in disgust at the lack of “real” brands.
ABC’s immensely successful Lost, for instance, offers its castaway charac-
ters only a generic, fictional brand of food, with no noticeable audience
attrition as a result.
• The kinds of movies that placement agencies love—big budgets, lots of ac-
tion and effects, huge opening weekends, happy endings—are rarely about
“real” things. More like asteroids or giant waves hitting earth, real life dino-
saurs, the White House being shot up by a spaceship, a hero who gets out of
scrapes with highly unlikely gadgets, and so on.
• When, occasionally, two movies with more or less the same theme emerge
from Hollywood at about the same time (e.g., Deep Impact and Armaged-
don; A Bug’s Life and Antz), we would expect them both to have the same
amount of product placement in them. And yet we find 18 brand appear-
ances in Capote but only five in Infamous. (Both films are realist dramas
that tell basically the same story about a specific period in the life of writer
Truman Capote.)

Based on the evidence available, then, we should understand that product
placement does not exist to beef up the “realism” of movies, their capacity to
reflect precisely the world around us. Product placement is advertising by an-
other name. While the negative consequences for the creative process of story-
telling through the media of film or television are sometimes hard to quantify,
there is no doubt that many films and television programs have been altered
either before or during production—in order to accommodate products and
services. Editing and pacing have been changed as the camera is held static to
display a product logo. Dialogue and scripts are altered to include brands, and
settings have sometimes been changed to foreground products. Manufactures
pay higher sums to have the stars of the big screen mention their products,
wear their clothes, and drive their cars, and increasingly, we are even seeing
significant placement in trailers. For example, the trailer for The Transporter
2 acted as an ode to Audi as much as an advertisement for the film. Film cul-
ture continues to confer artistic status to the medium, with awards given for
editing, camerawork, acting, set, and costume design. Yet with product place-
ment, the collaboration revolves around the motivation to sell, a motivation
distinct from the necessities of character development, narrative, and filmic
aesthetics.