Taking Product Placement to a New Level

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, made by Sony, features many shots of Sony products. This is the usual product placement strategy, and it is expected. It’s not blatant. It’s subliminal, to a degree.

But what’s happening now is that global brands are hi-jacking films and turning them into feature-length advertisements. There is no artistic or creative input behind the films Sex Tape and The Internship. They are not pushing boundaries. They are safely aligning with the principles and culture of their respective brands. These mainstream, four-quadrant summer comedies are about as dull as choosing beige as your bathroom colour scheme. If the product is jeopardised as a result of over-marketing your brand or because of negligence of creativity, the strategy will fail – audiences will reject the product and the goal of embedding the brand in the psyche of modern culture will have been wasted.

Is it Apple’s dream to be attached to the bad taste in people’s mouths as they exit the cinema after having seen Sex Tape? Was it Google’s vision to be thought of as a creative disappointment, just like The Internship is? Are these really what two of the biggest brands in the world strived to achieve?

It seems as though Google and Apple had the idea to use film as a way to increase their brand (as if they needed increasing) and constructed broad comedies around that purpose. This is not just simple product placement. Taking away the product in these two films would mean that the film would not exist. They’re 90-minute advertisements.

The Internship made $95m worldwide on a $58m budget (excluding marketing) and Sex Tape made $120m worldwide on a $40m budget (also excluding marketing). These are not great numbers. Movie accounting does not work in such a way that one can simply deduct the budget from the revenue to reveal the profit. Worldwide revenue needs to substantially multiply the budget in order for a film to be viewed a success, and these two films really did not perform well.

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower”

Do you know who said that? Steve Jobs. I wonder if he’d be proud to lend his brand to such masterful innovation as Sex Tape.

It’s simple; when your main reason for making a movie is to advertise a product or brand, it will most likely fail. People watch movies to be entertained. That must be the priority. Product placement and reflecting society are perfectly fine as long as the film comes first. The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Sex Tape and The Internship all contain product placements, but the difference is that one focused on story, entertainment, enjoyment, fun and the creative process, and the others concentrated on not having 5 minutes pass by without mentioning the brand, and it’s obvious which strategy was more profitable.