I don’t know if it’s just the fact I haen’t been to bed since yesturday morning, but beagledave, I have no idea how your posts are supposed to flow or fit into anything.
The rant is not about the effectiveness of product placement, it’s about how fucking stupid I think it is that some group feels that media is so impactful that the simple suggestion that a character smokes should be hidden away from society “for the children’s sake.”
You will find that, within the advertising world itself, many people feel the impact advertising has is nothing more than a prompt. It’s there to help give you an idea that “if you’re going to do something, you’ve got options, our’s is best,” but lacks the power to influence someone to do something they have no intention of trying. If you’re not hungry, it doesn’t matter how many times I throw images of a Big Mac in your face, you’re not going to buy one. So, although it does have the power to sway, showing characters on stage smoking is not going to suddenly make little children think “Hey, I’m going to go buy a pack of cigarrettes right now and start smoking.” For life impacting decisions like that, family, friends, and peers are the solid influences, and the media is no where there.
As for the product placement issue, the way these people made it sound, they seemed to believe Marlboro reads a script and tells a company “Hey, if you make this guy smoke, and only smoke our brands, we’ll give you money.” That’s horse shit. Paying a studio to have Superman thrown through a Camel billboard and paying them to change the script to promote your product are two completely different things. And paying to have specific cigs smoked on screen…well, honestly, when was the last time you noticed what brand of cigs someone smoked in a movie? Especially something like James Bond? The character has been smoking since he was conceived (anyone who has that much sex, it’d be blasphemy if he didn’t). He also smokes from a cigarrette case, if I’m not mistaken, as does everyone else who smokes in that film. I don’t recall them making any special notice that the missle cig was a Lucky Brand Missle Cig. Unless you’re a hardcore smoker and that’s your brand, I doubt anyone would notice or even care.
But again, this is all off topic. I’m just sick of people constantly trying to censor everything thinking that society has become so touchy about everything. It’s like Spielburgh editing out the guns in E.T.. How is it the children of today are so sensitive to violence, yet the children of the early 80’s could handle close ups of shotguns being cocked and aimed at little Eliot’s face? Pretty soon, someone’s going to lobby that any movie with alcohol in any form should be rated R, and then what? Any form of public affection could be misconstrued as telling our kids it’s okay to start fucking at age 12, so that obviously must be kept from their view. And anyone drinking coffee is obvously teaching our kids bad habits, because that much caffine isn’t good for young ones, so we’ll have to censor that as well.
It’s horseshit. It’s overreacting, and people need to realize that yes, whereas the media does help to set societal norms, it’s also a reflection of them and it’s impact on children is not so severe that we need to provide our children with nothing but “educational” programing, or shit so bad it makes our kids want to gougue out their eyes.
) that got me started. I coughed and hacked at first, but eventually got the hang of it. Been off the weed for 1.5 years now and glad of it. Managed to buy a new car with the money saved. Well, the down payment anyway. 
