I normally don’t mind it. It’s like real life. If I open the fridge, I’m gonna see Coke.
It’s take me more out of the moment to see made up generic no-name cola or when people have to dance around saying brand names.
It mostly depends on the obtrusiveness of the placement. If it’s inconsequential and somewhere in the background, no big deal. If it’s ‘I will now use my VERIZON phone because it gets me the best reception!’, that would take me out of the movie. Most marketers can’t be subtle.
Also, as a sponsor has now invested in a movie, it will try to put it’s stamp on the movie or show itself. This usually has hilarious results.
Many years ago I read an article in Atlantic Monthly about how product placement is also used to diss the competition – e.g., in Missing, Coke apparently paid to have Pepsi machines prominently visible in the scenes set in the stadium where Pinochet’s thugs were detaining political dissidents.
That doesn’t sound entirely legal…
I agree with this completely. For me it is all about creating a realistic environment. “The Middle” is a funny enough show but it is distracting and shuts down my suspension of disbelief whenever we see a car and they have explicitly blacked out the brand. One of the characters works in a car dealership so it is particularly distracting. “Castaway” in my opinion was much more realistic set in the FedEx environment than it would have been if they had made up “Acme Express” or something stupid like that.
Product placement to me can be annoying in two ways:
[ul]
[li]Lack of products: too scared to annoy potential sponsors, an unrealistic lack of real life products is present, or fake products are present.[/li][li]Too much of one product: it is possible to go too far in one direction. If everyone in a bar is drinking Bud Light with the label facing foward it is also unrealistic.[/li][/ul]
Having said that, I’ve seen examples of deliberately going too far in each of those directions for successful comedic effect. The shameless product placement scenes in Waynes World is one example. Another is the generic cans of “Food” and “Beer” in Repo Man.
Any Given Sunday suffered in my opinion because of the “made-up” football teams. Of course the thing there was the NFL didn’t want to be product placed, so to speak.
There are times when it’s egregious – just simply on the screen too long, for no good plot reason. I suppose my favorite example would be I, Robot – as Will Smith gradually laces up his “vintage” Converse All Stars. It takes so long, it just takes me out of the movie, which unlike other people, I actually enjoyed.
If I notice it, it takes me out of the movie. If I’m watching a group of zombie hunters frantically call for backup and, due to the shot of the phone, I’m inwardly rolling my eyes thinking “Buy Motorola!” or watch someone racing against the clock to hack the reactor and think “Apple laptops… for when you need to hack a reactor now!” then the placement is obviously detrimental to my enjoying the film.
On the other hand, if I don’t register that it was a Motorola phone or an Apple laptop (as I’m sure I miss many existing brands being used in films), did the placement work? Beats me. If not then the only product placement is bad product placement because by its very nature it removes me from the film.
In The Thomas Crown Affair the action stops while Rene Russo chugs a can of Pepsi (I think). In Twister, they make the little wings for the airborne sensors out of soda cans - every single one of which was one company’s product. Both of those were intrusive product placement.
But for someone eating lunch at their desk to have a can of Coke as part of it is fairly realistic.
This. There is a huge difference between unobtrusive, natural-seeming product placement and something egregiously excessive or inept.
Good product placement doesn’t draw a lot of attention to itself.
Bad product placement can really detract from a movie. Cast Away was a good movie, but a Robinson Crusoe sort of film really doesn’t need a single corporate logo to be prominently on-screen for 70% of the movie – it gets a bit distracting. (I seem to recall another Tom Hanks movie where the freaking TITLE is product placement for AOL. Classy!)
Sometimes it’s ridiculously awkward and inept. There is a scene in Manhunter that tries to serve product placement and character development equally, and the result is jarring. The scene is set in a grocery store for ease-of-placement, and Will Graham and his son are having a conversation as the camera dollies past dozens and dozens of brands. It is extraordinarily distracting because the products are apparently arranged according to sponsor, and there is no logical order to them: Jell-o, Kelloggs’ cereal, Pringles, Kraft Peanut Butter, and on. Meanwhile, Daddy is explaining to Jr. about the time he spent in the institution, how in order to catch the bad guys he had to think like a bad guy, but he found that he couldn’t stop thinking like a bad guy and started obsessing about hurting people. “And that’s why the kids at school are teasing you, son.” “Oh. And what’s that coffee that you and mom like? Folger’s, right?” “Right, son.” Jr. holds the can up so the label takes up a third of the screen before placing it in the cart You see how this creates a little dissonance?
Another example of enraging product placement is…. some forgettable movie (The Net, maybe) where a hot super hacker worms her way into some super special server somewhere… and her session is prefaced by a prominent display of the NetZero logo. (This at the time when their business model was based on providing spotty dial-up access to morons at no cost, with revenue coming from advertisers who bought extrastitial ad space directly from NetZero.)
I’m not sure Cast Away even counts as product placement for FedEx, at least not paid product placement. From Wikipedia:
Personally I didn’t notice excessive placement in this movie. There was a lot of FedEx around, but it felt realistic, given a FedEx employee on a FexEx plane that crashes with hundreds of FedEx packages on board! The Wilson placement didn’t even register at the time with me, although I think that is a similar story.
Everybody Owns A Ford.
(Warning-TV Tropes link) 
His name is Voit!
Well obviously YMMV. I totally agree with you on Thomas Crown because she not only drank the Pepsi, when she sat it down she looked at it then turned the can so the logo was facing the camera. There’s also the scene at the airport at the end where she buys a ticket and holds her American Express card out to the agent held by the edges and centered on the screen so it could be clearly seen.
OTOH, I couldn’t even tell you what kind of cans they used in Twister. I know they were drink cans but I couldn’t say if they were Coke, Pepsi or Bud Light. Given that the plot called for pinwheels made of aluminum (which makes as much sense as anything else in that movie) I would have assumed that the prop department just went down to the nearest grocery store, grabbed whatever was on sale that week and just went with that.
(Not saying you’re wrong, just that I certainly didn’t notice it as such.)
There was a huge court case back in the 80’s about a Burger King commercial.
In 1982, Burger King created an advertising stir when it created a set of commercials featuring a then-4-year-old Sarah Michelle Gellar, in which Gellar stated that McDonald’s burgers were 20% smaller than Burger King’s. Arguably the first attack ads on a food chain by a competitor, the campaign was controversial in that prior to it, fast food ads only made allusions to the competition in a vague manner, never mentioning them by name. McDonald’s sued Burger King, the advertising agency that came up with the ads, and Gellar. The suit was settled the following year on undisclosed terms.[21]
Since then, it has been OK to criticize the competition without being sued. I think it has something to do with free speech.
Two and a Half Men does something interesting–they make fake Sam Adams and Corona labels that look almost exactly like the real thing, but say something slightly different on them. Like the Sam Adams label says Sam Adams instead of Samuel Adams, and Corona says Cerveza, I think. But other than that, the labels and bottles look exactly the same as the actual beer.
This is fairly common—On “King Of Queens” the main character’s (Doug) brand was obviously supposed to be Miller High Life, so they modified the label just a bit, but it was still completely, fully recognizably Miller.
They have also done the same with Corona bottles, in a scene where they were at a Mexican joint.
Why is it that everyone in movies and TV shows appears to use an Apple laptop? Is it because they “look cool”, or because beret-wearing latte-sipping writers don’t know of any other type of computer, or because Apple spends placement dollars like a drunken sailor?
Product placement in movies and TV doesn’t bother me normally. The one thing that bugs me and I don’t know how I feel about it is on the Food Network.
They seem to (on the shows I’ve watched) make an effort to show the canned products as very generic. Like, it’ll say “TOMATO SAUCE” and nothing else.
One one hand I think it’s good that they aren’t allowing their expert opinions to be purchased by companies, but on the other hand if a chef REALLY likes one brand over another for quality reasons I would like to hear about it.
So I guess I don’t really know which way is better in that situation.
I heard this was a directorial decision. Directors want something photogenic, and it’s hard to argue that Mac’s don’t look good.
However, the venerable TRS-80 Model 100 had a long and venerable TV/movie career before the MacBook was invented.
