My vote is in last week’s The Patient. Title character unpacks a printer. Not only is the brand clearly visible but the therapist character inexplicably asks from the other room what the brand is so the name can be said out loud.
Subway in Community was subtle in comparison.
I wonder if Subway realized that the whole point of that was to point out how stupid product placement is, and how mediocre their food is?
But it would be very “Community” to get placement money from a company at the same time you’re mocking it.
My contribution is the show Alias. Every Nokia phone rang with their standard ringtone, and every car chase had a shot of the badge on the back (Ford, I think).
Subway claimed to be in on the joke for both Community and Chuck.
They just wanted the visibility.
American Pickers switched to Ford Transit vans instead of their old Mercedes. Ford is one of their sponsors. In one of the first episodes after the switch Danni has to go get something and exclaims, “I’ll just pick it up with the Transit Connect!”
Eureka had one episode where the heroes used Degree deodorant to protect themselves from some sort of extreme heat.
Meanwhile, there was a Monk episode where Monk was hired to figure out who dented his client’s Buick Lucerne. They made an obvious point of mentioning that it was a Buick Lucerne.
I don’t mind badge shots on cars anymore, it’s basically the standard. But I remember on the USA “character” shows like Suits or White Collar, they would straight up have scenes where someone would be like “Let me use the Parking Assist™ Feature!”
I’ve even seen those badge shots in movies like Iron Man or recent James Bond.
Another Monk episode (Mr. Monk and the UFO) had Sleep Inn mentioned/shown several times.
My favorite was in Angie Tribeca. They put a Little Caesar’s ad in the middle of the show.
The Bond movies have a long history of product placement. Most egregious example I can remember was a car chase in Moonraker where they speed through Rio going past numerous billboards for various products.
It doesn’t get any more forced than the McDonald’s birthday party scene in Mac and Me, complete with Ronald McDonald cameo. Mac and Me | McDonald's Dance Contest/Birthday Party - YouTube
I can’t think of any specific examples and have no clips, but at one point in the show Bones, they kept devoting portions of episodes to being car commercials. To the extent where they’d do something like get in a vehicle, do a voice command to initiate GPS, and then the characters would comment on how great the feature was.
It was not done with irony, there was no “we have to do this so wink wink” effort. They tried and failed horribly to make it organic and natural within the script, and it really wasn’t. It was painfully obvious.
Hey, I just Googled it, and found a brief article talking about it.
Fans of the TV show Bones , which returns tonight at at 8 PM ET on Fox, have a love-hate relationship with one of the series’ oddest little quirks: approximately four times per season, an episode will stop dead for about 60 seconds while the characters talk enthusiastically about some cool feature or another on the Toyota they’re riding in.
A better product placement is on the show Reservation Dogs (which is fantastic, for anyone who hasn’t seen the show, go see it on Hulu). They are always eating from Sonic restaurants. It’s like the entire reservation survives off of it. (That, and fried catfish and some kind of generic Flaming Hot Cheetos knock-off, though there are plots based around those things.)
The way they are always eating at Sonic is just funny. There is always a cup or tater tots or something in every scene. Taika Waititi (of What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok, as well as others) created the show, so he knows how to make things work.
I feel like the one that started it all was the Heroes Nissan Versa placement.
But not in Biggest Loser.
Hawaii 5-0 had a partnership with Microsoft that obligated characters to use Windows Phones (which were actually decent and it’s a shame they never caught on) and also to tell each other to “Bing it” unironically. And the Microsoft PixelSense computer they had in the office did most of the crime-solving for them (only to be dismissed later on a MacGyver crossover as a “big stupid iPad”). But that was pretty subtle all in all. When it came to Subway on the other hand… well, I’ll let the scene speak for itself:
In 2006 there was an anime called Code Geass about a young man who fought against a brutal imperialist power with his supernatural ability to force a person to obey any single command he gives them. Giant combat robots were also involved. It wasn’t a particularly good series in my opinion, but one thing it had was incredibly awkward Pizza Hut product placement. It was so awkward that pizza hut became a meme associated with the show.
You can see some examples here along with the possible explanation that folks at the studio were amusing themselves by inserting pizza everywhere they could in the show. Evidently, the product placement has been removed in more recent streaming versions.
“Look, Francine! Tab, for our diet!”
Polyester
I think that wasn’t the worst from Heroes.
In the offending episode, a cheerleader played by Hayden Panettiere exits practice and finds her father, who has come to pick her up and arrived with a birthday present.
Dad reaches into his pocket, and out comes a fresh set of car keys, with a distinct logo. The camera dollys past the front of the car, and the Nissan logo comes into the frame. “Oh my gosh!” she screams. “You got me the Rogue.”
My wife drives a Nissan Rogue, and I sometimes tease her with that line.
I kind of assumed that on Reservation Dogs Sonic was one of the only if not the only place to eat. (Similarly, Friday Night Lights often featured Applebee’s, but again, I figured small towns in Texas were lacking in restaurant choices.)
And yes, that Subway scene in Hawaii Five-O was pretty awful.
Back in the 60s, Ford insisted on product placement on The FBI. The heroes always drove Fords and the villains never did. Ford even took the slogan “Ford is a Better Idea” from the show.
Probably the first actual product placement was in the Marx Brothers Love Happy. The producers were running short of money, so they asked advertisers to pay to show their logos in the climactic chase scene.
Absolutely. There’s an easy in-universe explanation for it. They established of course that there are other places to eat (the kids really love that catfish at that particular diner) but it might be the only fast-food option, which would explain why you see it everywhere.
Of course, the real explanation is product placement. But in this show, it really works.
It’s also not far-fetched. When I was very young, my hometown also had limited fast food options. It used to be a lot more rural than it is now. If you wanted fast food, you had to go to a (relatively obscure) chain called “Herfy’s” (which still exists). We didn’t get places like McDonald’s, or Burger King, or KFC until I was a bit older. (These days, my hometown is heavily developed and commercialized, and you can find any major fast-food place there.)
Green Acres: The Douglas’s began the series driving a Lincoln Continental convertible, painted to look like it had been driven on a dirt road and not washed. In the last few seasons the Lincoln convertible no longer being produced, so they switched to a Mercury convertible. And their county agent Hank Kimball drove a Bronco.