I’ve been giving this some thought lately with the plethora of advertising tied in to the latest Star Wars movie. Take the Nissan ad campaign, for example. Does Nissan marketing go to the Star Wars people and ask to do a Star Wars related ad campaign? Or do the Star Wars marketing people decide they want to do an ad campaign with a car company? And if so, how do they decide which car company? Obviously the ad campaign will drive movie ticket sales, but how is it supposed to make me want to go out and buy a Nissan?
Disclaimer: I work at an ad agency, and a number of my clients have done tie-ins with TV shows and movies over the years.
It can work both ways; for a very popular franchise like Star Wars, advertisers may well approach Lucasfilm / Disney Licensing, looking to tie in to the next release. Or (particularly for smaller franchises / titles), the licensing / merchandising team at the studio will contact potential partners (often ad agencies, rather than manufacturers), trying to convince them that their movie will be successful, and is a good fit for their clients. Big ad agencies will have people (and maybe even entire departments) who specifically work on these sorts of sponsorships and tie-ins.
In the case of a big franchise like Star Wars, they very likely get more proposals for tie-ins than they can (or want to) use, and they’ll typically provide “exclusivity” within a category to a partner (i.e, they’ll only have one car tie-in partner, one trading card partner, one action figure partner, etc.). To evaluate the proposals, they’ll be looking at how much money the potential partner is willing to spend behind it (since a good tie-in should also be helping to build interest in the movie), the quality of the product being tied in, and whether it’s a good fit with the movie itself (i.e, for a kid-oriented movie like Star Wars, they aren’t going to go with a beer partner). The Nissan / Star Wars tie-in started last year, when Nissan did a special “Rogue One” edition of their Rogue SUV.
Too late to add: in the case of a big movie like Star Wars, it’ll nearly always be the tie-in partner who’s paying the studio (Lucasfilm) for the right to create and market tie-in products.
Part of Lucas’s genius with the original film (and a big part of what funded his fortune) was negotiating with 20th Century Fox to keep all of the merchandising rights for the movies – back then, merchandising wasn’t seen as a big money-maker (you might sell a few t-shirts or posters), and Fox felt that the real money was in the distribution rights.
To tie in with the Goldeneye thread, BMW paid 2 or 3 million to feature the Z3 as the Bond car. They issued a special Z3 Bond Edition and supposedly made an extra 200 million or so due to the exposure. Not a bad return.
Dennis
Product placement in a movie (like the Bond car) makes sense to me as advertising for the product, paid for by the makers of that product. The car chase scenes are part-car commercial.
But I think the OP is talking about standalone advertisements that are somehow for both the movie and some other product. I recently saw a car ad that had Star Wars figures in it (I think the driver is fantasizing about being in a Star Wars movie but I wasn’t paying that much attention). And the end was something like “Drive the new whatever and see Star Wars The Last Jedi, opening…”
To me, that sort of works as a movie ad (and it did work for me as a movie ad. I was reminded about the movie and went to see it), but it doesn’t really work as a car ad. Like, I can see how someone would see James Bond doing awesome things with a BMW and then think “BMWs are awesome”. But it’s hard for me to think someone sees this commercial and thinks “whatever car that had an ad with stormtroopers are in it is awesome.” And my support for this is that I don’t even remember what car it was, but I sure remember Star Wars. So that makes me think that this would be something that the makers of the movie would spend more on. On the other hand, it’s Star Wars, and everyone loves Star Wars, so maybe car companies are falling all over themselves to help Star Wars advertise.
I think that this was just an ad tie-in? Like there isn’t actually a Star Wars version of the car. Although I’d be entertained if there were and it had, say, EPA milage estimates in parsecs per gallon (or, since it’s Star Wars, possibly 1-60 measured in parsecs).