That’s the first one I thought of.
Quentin Tarantino has pushed the Big Kahuna Burger chain in several of his movies.
Let’s also not forget Pizza Planet!
While we are going down this path, who can forget the over-the-top pushing of Brawndo, the Thirst Mutilator!
It’s got electrolytes!
You know product placement has gone too far when the Department of Agriculture is putting your product on crops.
Idiocracy did somewhat show a world where product placement could potentially be apocalyptic. So that’s actually a great mention.
The Mad Magazine satire described a case where the criminal was sentenced to 99 years in prison “which was reduced to six months for having the good taste to use a Mustang as the get-away car.”
I think it must be a David Boreanaz thing. On his current show SEAL Team, they always make a point of showing him driving the latest GMC full-size pickup, and in one or two episodes, have had the nifty tailgate features in use.
Generally I’m not so annoyed with product placement, as long as it’s subtle. Like say… having a character wear a certain brand of sneakers, or show billboards in the background/locations in the background. Or even like in say, Stranger Things where Eleven crushes a Coke can. It was clearly product placement, but at least plausible product placement, as Coke was the market leader at the time within the show.
But it is kind of annoying when the show is as blatant about it as say… White Collar was, when they’d have a character driving some new Ford vehicle, cut to commercial, and literally have that SAME vehicle advertised. Or vice-versa- advertise, then first scene back would involve the car. I don’t recall if it was the same color and everything, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
He was an executive producer (pretty common thing on long-running shows for the top-billed stars). So who knows, maybe it was his idea originally.
Some of the examples make the product placements on The Truman Show (the in-universe show) look subtle.
Old-time radio used a lot of awkward product placements. The Burns and Allen Show had announcer Bill Goodman come by and start talking about Swan Soap or Maxwell House Coffee in clunky bits ot dialog.
“Would you want some coffee, Bill?”
“Would I? I’d love some Maxwell House coffee. It’s good to the last drop, you know.”
On those early radio and TV shows, wasn’t there typically only one sponsor per episode? Or the same single sponsor for the entire run of the show?
Radio often had a single sponsor, sometimes with their name in the title (e.g., The Chase and Sandborn Show starring Edgar Bergan and Charlie McCarthy).
Early TV shows were sponsored by advertisers (The Colgate Comedy Hour), though the ads were kept separate from the show. Sometimes two sponsors would share a show; one would get two commercials and the other , Alternate sponsor, would have one. The next week, the alternate sponsor would have two and the first week’s sponsor would have one. The sponsor produced the show.
The networks phased out this type of sponsorship (The Kraft Music Hall was probably the last). The argument was that it prevented sponsor interference, but the main reason was that by selling commercial time to multiple advertisers, the networks made more money.
It just occurred to me that nobody mentioned Sesame Street! They’d have an episode brought to you by the letter K, and then they’d inevitably have a segment devoted to it.
(Someone had to mention this eventually. )
There was also the prominent product placement for Hoyt-Clagwell tractors.
OK, that was even worse than the Hawaii 5-0 Subway ad that @DWMarch beat me to.
There was also a pretty blatant one for some smartphone or another (back when that was a Big Deal) in Snakes on a Plane.
My favorite, though, was from Iron Man, shortly after he escapes from captivity, and the two things he wants first are a press conference and a burger. The product placement for Burger King was so blatant that it pulled me out of the movie and into thinking about money-grubbing ultra-capitalists… which of course pulled me right back into the movie.
What about the horrible, horrible, horrible crime against humanity that was the film Mac and Me?
They had an extended dance scene in a McDonald’s for a kid’s birthday party that really had nothing to do with the plot of the film.
I apologize profusely in advance.
If for some reason you need to know what’s going on, there is supposed to be an alien disguised as a teddy bear in that scene, the eponymous “Mac”. I will not get into everything wrong with this scene or film, because it will likely hijack the entire thread. Just note that as bad as the movie was, this brought it down even worse.
It’s like finding a rotten cheeseburger in your value meal, and there is a severed finger under the cheese.
Picking this out for Leonard Part 6 is a clear case of piling on, but among the many, many complaints about the movie was the blatant product placement for Coca-Cola.
Of course, the entire film Mac and Me was created entirely for the sole purpose of product placement, so…
It was fairly common back then for all the vehicles on a TV show to be from the same manufacturer as a form of product placement. Everyone on The Andy Griffith Show drove a Ford as well. The Beverly Hillbillies was all Chrysler. But since we’re talking about awkward product placement, Mr. Ed was sponsored by Studebaker, making the show appear to take place in some alternate universe in which Studebakers were the most popular cars.
Eh, I know a lot of people complain about that but I never found it that blatant. It’s just a quick shot that has the bag in it, not even a close up. They never say Burger King or Whopper or anything like that.