I’m used to blatant produce placement in movies. But I’d never noticed it much before last night in TV episodes. In “Elementary”, Sherlock makes a big flourish of opening his new Microsoft Surface Tablet, clicking & attaching the keyboard and searching using Microsoft’s new Windows version. Ridiculous. Took any sentient being completely out of the story. I hope they were paid well. They lost this viewer.
I’m sure this has been going on for a long time & it had to be this blatant & egregious for me to notice.
I noticed this same product being placed in Suburgatory the other night. In fact her story line centered on how she was filling her empty time with reading her tablet, of which they went to great pains to demonstrate the detatchable keyboard. If they would not have had so many commercials for it I don’t think it would have bothered me so much.
Just thought… didn’t 50s American TV shows have the characters break right out of the story and do a full-on endorsement of some product or other, and then go straight back to the story? Or am I dreaming that?
On Hawaii Five-0, the characters drive Chevys (and there’s a commercial during the show mentioning the brand’s association with the show) and they prominently use Microsoft phones, tablets and a table-top Microsoft Surface computer in their headquarters.
I think the American version of The Office had a product placement deal with Chili’s Restaurants (where the gang went for the Dundies Awards) and Staples (one of the characters used a Staples-brand shredder in one scene shown in the opening credits). And you can see that they’re using Cisco VOIP phones and HP computers.
But the worst, most blatant example of product placement I can think of is during Burn Notice, when Michael Westen’s narration mentions (paraphrased, as I can’t remember the exact text) that in a chase situation, it helps to have a vehicle with good acceleration and rear-wheel drive, as the camera tightly focuses on the Hyundai logo on the back of the car.
Yes, TV and radio shows often had corporate sponsors (sometimes the show was even named after them), and those sponsors were plugged on the show instead of or in addition to having independent commercials shown during breaks in the program.
When I catch a “How I Met Your Mother” rerun, I spend more time waiting for the obligatory Safe Auto insurance logo than actually paying attention to the show.
My wife and I just make a game of calling the placements out: Detective pulls out cell phone, showing logo…
“Buy Samsung!!”
Some old shows filmed commercials with the actors in character on the shows’ sets enjoying the sponsor’s products. These would air during the breaks in the show itself. Some that come to mind are cereal commercials with the “The Andy Griffith Show” folks and cigarette commercials with Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore. I also remember cigarette ads with Lucy and Desi and, most interestingly, Fred and Wilma of the “The Flinstones”.
This one seems created to air at the end of a particular episode of TAGS as it features characters, the little old ladies, who only appeared in that one episode.
I don’t watch very much network TV any more, but the first place I found it really blatant was in Modern Family. Every episode will have some of them in their Toyotas—sometimes discussing the car’s features—and episodes have revolved around trips to a particular resort hotel in Hawai’i on Continental Airlines, and Phil’s lust for an iPad. To me, that’s a lot different from every car in Mayberry being a Ford.
Big Bang Theory. They drink this stuff called “Cola” It looks exactly like a Coke can only except it’s not Coke. WTF?
I assume they do this because they don’t want to give away any free product placements. But why the hell would you go through the trouble of making your faux soda look exactly like a Coke can? Thus giving most unobservant people the impression they are drinking Coke anyway? (And unwittingly giving Coke a free plug)
Eh. I’d rather have this then have Phil wanting to by a MyPad. Fake names of real products take you out of the story immediately, as if they are saying “What you are watching is fake and takes place in a fake world! This is a TV show!”
Now when it’s clearly added in just to be an ad, like they did with a car on one terrible episode of Bones, and currently on episodes of Shark Tank, then it’s off-putting.
To me that seems quaint and charming, compared to the modern embedding technique which seems cynical and manipulative. They should go back to that. I’m thinking maybe Jack Bauer breaking out of interrogating a suspected terrorist:
“Tough, sticky blood stains? I use JIZZ brand washing flakes. JIZZ, for all your washing needs. Use JIZZ, or I will break you like a stick”.
(Background: terrorist beams and gives two thumbs up… interrogation resumes.)
Most blatant one I can think of was the Bones episode where they shilled Avatar. The characters stared in awestruck amazement at clips from the trailer and exclaimed that it was going to be “so much more than a movie” before three of them go to camp out for good seats. I seem to remember it be a pretty crappy mystery too. It annoyed me because it wasn’t simply an awkward mention or a lingering shot on a logo, it was an entire subplot made purely as an advertisement.
The most extraordinarily blatant bit of product placement I think I’ve seen was on Pawn Stars when they plugged Subway constantly. They even made it part of their little office bets.
Most blatant I’ve seen has gotta be Chuck. For no reason, they would stop in the middle of the show and wax eloquent about Subway sandwiches, going ingredient by ingredient. It took several minutes.
Edit:
One of the funniest of those, I feel, is iCarly. Instead of Apple Computer products, they have “Pear” everything. PearPads, PearPhones, PearBooks. And the pear-shaped phones are so ridiculously-impractical looking that it’s downright comical.
