They do do this. They also have pear-phones and stuff.
Right on the nose. The advertisers are the customers, and the viewers are the product.
[Homer]I saw this movie about a bus that had to SPEED around a city, keeping its SPEED over fifty, and if its SPEED dropped, it would explode! I think it was called “The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down.”[/Homer]
Product placement doesn’t usually bother me. In fact, I think the only time it does is in movies or television shows that are shitty for other reasons, because the product placement is always obnoxious and clumsy (like everything else in the film).
Return of the Killer Tomatoes has a “Wayne’s World-esque” bit of product placement in it as well, in this YouTube clip it starts about 1:00 in and is continued on in part 6 and into the start of part 7
It actually predates the Wayne’s World product placement gag…
Hmm, for some reason I’m hungry for Kellog’s Corn Flakes, Pepsi, a Nestle Crunch and I’ll need some Crest to brush my teeth after that…
I think I’ll take my “Quadrunner” from Honda of San Diego to the corner store, it has excellent acceleration and rideability, and it also gets great gas mileage…
What realism?
Is it bad that I never quite clicked on this concept before? I mean, I knew that they needed to sell commercial space to the advertisers to make any money on the shows, and they were obviously in it for the money, but I never actually followed that thought to the logical conclusion.
Huh.
The Island went so far as to put brand name logos in the fake city that the clones (with no knowledge of the outside world) are living. I suppose you could justify by saying that the evil company farming them just didn’t bother delogoing off-the-shelf products they bought, but it’s still a little jarring.
One of the worst examples I’ve seen in a long while.
They may as well have held up a sign that says “Cough up three grand for one of our watches and you, too, can impress hot babes.”
Loved the movie but that was ridiculous!
It’s been a long time since I read the original books but I believe Bond wore a Rolex and drove a Bentley.
Yeah, I find it annoying when products are fake. I’d rather see the ‘annoying’ product placement. It would be nice if they mixed it up a bit, though, instead of having everything from one company.
What was so bad about that? Compared to the product placement shot of his Sony Ericsson cell phone or the Aston Martin cars, casually discussing his wristwatch seemed downright subtle.
Then again, I’ve had people who barely knew me stop to ask about my watch. Then again, my wristwatch tends to stand out when I’m wearing an untucked t-shirt and blue jeans (it’s a Skagen; I like it because it’s thin and is classy without being gaudy. Does this count as product placement on the Dope? Nevermind, let’s keep moving…)
Correct on both counts. IIRC, Omega was more willing to cough up promotional dough to the Bond producers than was Rolex, so his watch of choice changed to Omega.
I’m not sure when the change was made but I believe Connery wore a Rolex during the opening scenes of Dr. No, after he’d climbed out of his scuba gear and was waiting in a tuxedo for the explosion he’d set to go off.
I’m not sure about his cars prior to Goldfinger, when he got his Aston Martin. I recall a car something like a Bentley during the picnic scene at the beginning of From Russia With Love, but I’m not sure if that’s what it was.
Different strokes, I guess. I thought the Sony Ericsson, Aston Martin, Vaio, and even Ford placements were much less obvious than the Omega scene. I just don’t buy that a woman as beautiful and sophisticated as the Vesper Lynd character would stop in the middle of a verbal skewering in order to remark upon how ‘beautiful’ Bond’s deep sea diving watch was. Omega Seamasters are rugged, manly and cool, yes, but they aren’t beautiful except in the sense of workmanship. They have large, clunky markings for deep sea viewing and rotating bezels to keep track of how much time a diver has left in his tanks, and, in my opinion, they are far from beautiful in the sense that a woman would find a piece of male jewelry beautiful. Photo.
And then there was the lack of sublety. Omega might as well have had the characters hold up a sign that read “Cough up three grand for an Omega watch and beautiful women will love you!” (It might as well have been an Axe promotion. :D) In the other product placement scenes you simply saw the items in use; in that scene, a verbal lambasting was abruptly interrupted simply to allow Vesper an opportunity to remark upon how beautiful Bond’s watch was. It was not only obvious but ran completely counter to the tone of the rest of the scene.
Jennifer Westfeldt’s commentary on Ira & Abby sheds some light on the practice. Early in shooting, she was trying really hard to get this box of McDonald’s french fries into the shot, because McD’s had given her a lot of money. As shooting went on, they just let things be in the background, where you don’t even notice. It works better artistically, & you probably don’t lose money.
All I took from the watch discussion was that she was in the midst of describing the “uniform” Bond wears to look like what he thinks people look like, so a nice watch would go with it. Thus, Vesper, not actually caring about what kind of watch Bond was wearing, took a blind guess that he’d be wearing a Rolex cause it’s a popular brand. Bond corrected her, and that was pretty much it.
The Sony Ericsson thing seemed as unsubtle as it gets (I mean, it was an entire shot of nothing but the phone, brand name prominently displayed), but whatever, it’s a phone with GPS, I’ve used one in exactly the same way (it didn’t look nearly as cool). The Range Rover product placement kept throwing me out of the movie in Quantum of Solace. Seriously though, do they HAVE anything but Range Rovers in Colombia? It actually made the one time we see a Range Rover in Casino Royale extremely distracting for me when I watch that movie later.
I can see where you’re coming from, but the dialog preceeding the watch comment had moved away from Bond dressing for effect and on to a certain type of man which she found objectionable: “Former SAS types with easy smiles and expensive watches.” [Glances to see if she’s right] “Rolex?”
“Omega.”
[Looks again, admiringly] “Beautiful.”
And to me the images being displayed while Bond used the Sony Ericsson were the main focus of the scenes, with the phone’s manufacturer there for those who cared to look. The scenes weren’t interrupted to make Sony Ericsson the primary focus. Same with Ford, Aston Martin (iconic by now anyway), Vaio, etc.
This is an experience we all have. None of us is James Bond.
When it comes to ‘cool’ the key element is charisma. People make the mistake of thinking that if they buy or adopt things that are cool on someone else, it will make them cool too. But cool isn’t created by tangible products, it’s created by charisma. Charismatic people make things cool, not vice versa. The Bond actors (well, a couple of them anyway) make Aston Martin cars, Beretta pistols, martinis and suggestive comments to women seem cool because they have the charisma to make them seem that way. Take someone off the street, even a really good-looking guy, and give him the same accoutrements and he will not appear anywhere near as glamorous. He may in fact even look silly. And the reason for that is that that guy off the street, good-looking and even stylish as he may be, simply the charisma too pull it off. This is why it never works when an everyday Joe Blow tries to affect styles and/or buy supposedly cool things in an attempt to seem cool. He simply lacks the charisma that attaches cool to those things in the first place.
In my opinion charisma is the number one thing movie stars (as opposed to actors, though it’s possible to be both) get paid for. They are charismatic, and so the things they say and do and wear seem cool and/or interesting.
Frankly, all I remember of Quantum of Solace is that it seemed to be little but one fight scene after another. I’m sure you’re right but I just don’t remember enough about it to comment.
They do offer some sweet deals on bulk purchases. You’ll see the same thing on college campuses: Almost all non-Mac computers are Dells, because you can get them cheap through the bookstore.
One place I feel obliged to mention, where over-obtrusive product placement actually pulled me deeper into the movie: In Iron Man, the blatant product placement got me thinking about money-grubbing greedy unethical capitalists… Which was, after all, exactly what I was supposed to be thinking about.
Just to post an opposite example, in the series Babylon 5 there was a bar in the station (called the Zocolo) which had a large, neon “Zima” sign over it. A lot of fans were upset over what they thought was a product placement.
It turns out the production staff (may have been just J. Michael Strazynski but I think there were others involved) thought the concept of Zima surviving to the 23rd century was funny and put the sign there as a joke. I suppose Zima did get some level of advertising out of it but they had nothing to do with its placement.
And on another front, when Spielberg was first working on ET he wanted to have ET lured from hiding with M&M’s, but the M&M/Mars company refused to let him use their product. He then approached Reeses about using Reeses Pieces and the rest, as they say, is history. Reeses Pieces appearance in ET is probably one of the most successful product placements of all time.
The explanation behind the Zima sign was also what lead to my favorite fandom in-joke: The Narn Bat Squad (although the occasional srs bzness argument over Green vs. Purple never gets old either…)
I think you’ve got the wrong adverb there. The one you’re looking for is “sarcastically,” not “admiringly.” She’s not impressed by the watch. That’s the entire point of the scene. Vesper is laying out exactly how unimpressed she is with Bond. When Vesper says “Beautiful,” she’s not referring to the watch at all. She’s commenting on how perfectly Bond fits the stereotype she just described. All of which makes this, to me, the least egregious examples of product placement, because someone in the film is explicitly calling out someone for using the product as being a faceless, personality-free company drone, and specifically cites his use of the promoted product of evidence of his lack of character. It’s really not a great selling point for the watch, when you get right down to it.
I’m not sure if the watch even shows up in the scene in question. It’d be like if they had a conversation about his choice in automobiles while sitting at the hotel bar.