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You Look Like You Need a Guinness
prestidigital writes "This is a great fictional advertisement (high bandwidth) for Guinness. I say "fictional" because it is from the movie Minority Report. You may recall that Steven Spielberg is known for heavy branding in movies ala the opening scenes from Back to the Future (Burger King and Pepsi plastered all over). Well, apparently he has taken it a step further by weaving it into the very fabric of the plot in Minority Report. Cool ads if you can afford to wait for them. Lexus is good."
I don't know about anyone else.. But personally, I'd hate having an advertisement call me by name. Or advertisements that scan my eyes, and track me.
How about walking into a store, and having a big ad greet you? I don't think so.
Anyone agree?
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
1st Pint :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
If advertising is really about 'informing' the public to make 'rational' decisions, then why do advertises need to:
1) Employ psychologists who don't have an ounce of ethics in them
2) Have music in their adverts
3) Advertise over and over again when we all already know about their product
4) Spend double-digit percentages of their company's money on advertising
5) Have little in the way of actual information in their adverts, and instead just try and sell an image
The reality is, people are ignorant and highly controllable. Society is a socio-economic machine; there is no rationality nor any real understanding of how it works. Each individual mindlessly functions in relation to the little corner which they face on a day to day basis, and will decieve themselves into accepting and doing whatever they're tricked or pushed into thinking will make them personally more secure.
"Microsoft". Need I say more.
(Fucking close to water)
HTTP/1.1 400
It'd take truly excellent advertising to get me to install quicktime.
You can already see that this kind of advertising is soon to come. Ya get hundreds of email spam with your name on it and you get tons of phone calls a day congradulating YOU for being accepted for a new low rate card. How many of you agree that if not the eyes being scanned, there is at least this huge war for the eye balls at every website you go to. Remember those obnoxious flash adds, flashing adds, adds that run all over the page you are trying to read, and not to mention the ones with audio. I think there is a line that consumers are going to put up with. We have been pounded and proded by product placement in every single medium we use, and there is a point where you start to loose customers who get pissed off with this invasion of sanity. Hopefully people will speak up before the ads in this movie become a reality otherwise I am going to start wearing mirror sunglasses.
...Lexus being the prime example.
However, how do they plan to advertise other items presented on the page?
"Reebok - best running shoes for when you *really* need a fix of "clarity.""
"Lexus - Kicking the window is the only way out when the feds are on your ass."
Well I tried to watch the ad. It was there on my desktop. It starts off with a Guinness and some birds flying around in the top or something. Then, the screen goes all digitized and the soundtrack sounds like a modem trying to connect. Then, Windows tells me that QuickTime has caused a fatal error and must close.
All this because Mozilla is still downloading the file while I tried to watch it. Maybe I need to un-cap my cable modem. Or turn off Kazaa. Or just take all the pr0n out of my Kazaa folder, that seems to be over half of the traffic.
I wish I were drinking a Guinness right now, but Fat Tire Amber ain't too bad.'
Whoo Hoo! I got the Score +1 Bonus check box!
I've had 3 Guinesses this morning in the same time it took that clip to load. And that that includes settle time. ;->
Except of course that Back to the Future was co-written and directed by Robert Zemeckis and it was just Spielberg's production company (Amblin).
Maybe I just don't get the quote, but why is it said that Speilberg is known for heavy branding due to Back to the Future? He didn't direct that.
I understand that it is now just accepted to hate the guy, but that seems to be going out of the way a bit. Unless, of course, I am missing something. (Most probably)
I don't want just ANY Lexus now...I want the one in the movie. How about commenting on the cross promotion prevelant. In this month's Popular science is an article about that Lexus that Mr. Anderton drives around in. How about commenting on that: advertising disguised as news?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Just returning from the movie, my opinion was that it was pithy. Great ideas, but no substance.
:D
and for that matter, i just had to wonder if more effort was spent branding the movie as opposed to creating a 'beleivable' experience.
..besides, if coke has its way, there's not going to be any pepsi in 2054
Going into the store with you significant other...
"Ah! Joe Johansen! Good to see you again! We just received a new batch of KY in butterscotch, your favorite flavor, according the Basking Robbins!
We know you normally buy KY down at Big Al's Porn Shoppe on 32nd, but this store is 4 blocks closer to your home, and we know how awkward it is to get those 50 gallon drums home on the public slideway! Why not have one of our friendly clerks help you out to your car with one of the store's hand-trucks? Remember, we provide free curb service, where Big Al's doesn't!
How is Millie, your Yak, by the way? Has the infection she had responded to the Penicillin you purchased two weeks ago from Bob's Veterinary Supply? Is she still down in U-Store-It Storage Unit #15? We have a co-marketing agreement with U-Store-It, where if you buy from us today, you will get 5% off your next month's rent!
..."
[and on and on...]
Uh, no thank you!
In 50 years, at least half of the companies listed won't even exist any more, and anyone looking back at Minority Report will laugh at its childish view of the future. Once again, we're doing what they did in the 50s-80s, and expecting that the future will be all advanced, we'll have hovercars, video projections everywhere, etc.. I mean, see Back to the Future II. That was considered 'realistic' at the time, but it's just a piece of crap that we laugh at now.
In another 50 years when Pepsi is called Hypermegaglobaldrink and Lexus are the cheapest brandname on the planet, we'll have a good old laugh, just like we do at PanAm being in '2001'.
what the fuck - lexus sucks dogs farts. beemers are the only way to spend serious money. fuck commercials, fuck adverts, fuck capitalism, eat the rich, fuck their children, die, die, die!
I personally LIKE it when a movie set in our time period and our world uses branding on its set. Which one is more believable "Mom, I'm going down to the drugstore to buy a Super-Duper-Cola" or "Mom, I'm going down to the drugstore to buy a Coke"? Using fake brands in movies breaks my suspension of disbelief and annoys me. Same goes for video games.
$45 per U Colocation Special
Reebok. An ad shows clothing that changes color as runners exert themselves more vigorously. Consumers can program their clothing with the latest fashions by downloading directly from Nike.
If PKD were still alive he would be laughing his ass off at the product placements in this movie; not only are the ads portrayed as he envisioned, the moviemakers actually used the techniques being portrayed to help pay for the movie portraying them.
On second viewing I also have to say that the "not too futuristic future" is more different from ours than it first appears. Every flat surface in the movie's public space is a monitor showing ads. Even the cereal box! (That was soooo Philip K. Dick.) While The Gap might not be around in 2050, you can rest assured some other business serving the same niche will be; and it and the fashions within will be as unremarkable to the people of 2050 as the Gap and its product are to us in 2002.
And you have to really wonder whether the rest of the movie after Anderton is haloed is just a fantasy (a la Total Recall) or if it really happened...
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
They weren't high-resolution holograms with customized messages, but it still had the feeling of being smothered by commercials that I felt in Minority Report. I enjoyed the actual plot of the movie, but the deja vu of overactive commercials gave me a laugh.
This
Shouldn't we be charging Guinness for product-placement on Slashdot?
Finally a product placement I can relate to.
There is a reputed Blade Runner Curse, referring to a number of brands given prominent display in Blade Runner which fell victim to hard financial times during the 80's, with the exception of Coca-Cola. Brands such as Atari and Pan Am, which were featured quite prominently in ads on the sides of buildings lost a tremendous amount business, to the point of collapse (although I was shocked last week to see the Atari brand on my NWN box). It wouldn't surprise me, then, to see a number of companies shown in Minority Report to collapse before 2054, even currently viable corporate behemoths. I would like to think that their inclusion in a speculative illustration of dystopian coporate intrusion would be the "real reason" they collapsed, and that PKD somehow had a part in it, laughing at the irony of it all.
This is a great fictional advertisement (high bandwidth)...
:)
high bandwidth? not anymore
I put on my robe and wizard hat.
It wasn't a troll. And economists do say those things.
Free Mac Mini
But retinal scanners don't work.
The german magazine C'T already showed that it's too easy to fool the scanners (even without replacing your entire eyeballs). Either the scanners are too "loose" and they let too many ppl through, or they are too "tight" and they block too many ppl.
Not much you can do to fix that because eyes change. My eyes are slowly turning brown/green from brown and some other slashdotter said that pregnant women's eyes change dramatically.
Retinal scanner vendors are just selling vaporware. Can't work for a small group of ppl, and certainly won't work for the entire population of a country.
Some other bio ID might work in the future though, maybe when computerised facial recognition gets as good as a human's?
There are several marketroids I can name who sincerely believe their own bullshit. It's why I've put marketing pretty close to the top of my personal list of 10 most contemptible occupations (I'll give you a hint: it ranks just below politics)...
We are certainly taking a step in this direction. Airvertising/wireless advertising is already taking foot and with the advent of GPS based mobile phones and PDA's how long will it be until we are getting personalized and customized advertising. Customized to our locations at any given time, take this example you are walking down the street w/ your GPS enabled mobile device and you are nearing a 7-11. You then receive a wireless ad to your device letting you know that 7-11 is having a sale on their Super-big Gulps or whatever. This is just the tip of the iceberg folks.
Of course, there's no such thing as bad publicity. And the hero was usually blandly accepting of the adverts, providing a role model for the consumer masses to follow. The only time a commercial really angered him- when he threw an overly loud cereal box across the room- the brand name was blatantly fake.
When I saw this movie, the large amount of blatant product placements was sickening.
There were others not mentioned in the article...
Nokia had a huge spot, with their logo placed on every electronic device for an entire scene.
Burger king is also a whore, with their logo being well within plain view during a mall scene.
The first ad to catch my eye, was Aquafina. I guess they're still packaging aquafina water in 2054 with the same package design and logo.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Me and my friend kept a tall in the movie i think it was about 12 things which hav subconcoisuly entered my brain and made me want to by TAG give me tag now i tell u TAG c wat i mean i cant even go to a movie with out going through 15-30 mins worth of ads and then hav to c ads all thorouhg the movie before we no it we will be locked inside the therte until so we can watch the ads at the end of the movie but dont worry with things like film88.com ect... there wont be such things at theaters anymore. maybe it's a way to make money in movies with out making u buy it
If you look at:
the DEMOLITION MAN (1993) quote:
--------
Lenina Huxley: [T]aco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars.
John Spartan: So?
Lenina Huxley: So, now all restaurants are Taco Bell.
--------
and "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial" (1982) key scene where the film's main human character, 9-year-old Elliott, lured E.T. of the woods with Reese's Pieces
you'll see it's been around for a while.
See here Are you going to vote yes to PreCrime? Yes, I know that in the movie Precrime only exists in America, but to I really have to make up a zip code to take part in the tests? Shouldn't is also be a org.us?
But BMW, Benz, and Jaguar will never let them into that top 3. They'll always be a 2nd tier luxery car with the Infinities.
I saw the Lexus spot and was not exactly overwhelmed by it. The look is not of "2050", but of "2002". If you're trying to foresee the future, it can't stop on the spots.
Additionaly , the moment that the arrow leaves the bow, we're expecting some sort of movement in the picture. The arrow then transforms into the car, which could have been used to show the possible speed to the people. But no, the arrow leaves and we see it in front of a black background, so we have no idea of the speed.
Walking into a bookstore:
But, it might be neat to have tailored banner ads online. I mean, I never want to go hunting or fishing, so don't show me anything outdoorsy, but would like to see something regarding computer programming, but not games.
Click here or here.
There are also other intents of advertising, including the occasional rational decision type... check on trade journal and you'll see a lot of ads with a lot of real informational content. Image is, of course, another popular objective (Pepsi comes to mind).
Miko O'Sullivan
You got a source on that claim? I've never heard of any company doing such a thing. Advertising is much smaller percent expenditure than people seem to think. One of my marketing professors said that for most consumer products the percent of annual spending for the whole company is around half a percent.
Miko O'Sullivan
Personally, I liked the approach in "Repo Man" - they couldn't get any product placement $, so all products in the film were given generic labels: for example, "BEER".
Freedom: "I won't!"
Spielberg was only a producer on that movie. Zemeckis directed it.
"And like that
"It looks like you're writing a letter! Would you like me to go to staples.com and buy you more stationary with your ever-so-special pr0n on it?"
Look ma! Advertisements seemlessly woven into movies! This really is News for Nerds, Stuff that matters!! Slow news day, Michael?
Just so it isn't totally off-topic, seen the new singular wireless commercials? Shamu? MiB2 worms? I think they're opening up a new trend in cross brand commercialization... Surely I can submit that as a story and it will get accepted. Nah...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
That's not to say they don't have or use their knowledge of you, they've just found that people like to maintain their illusions of privacy.
Miko O'Sullivan
I am a little tired of hearing speilberg talk about how independent he is now that he has his level of success. If he was independent he would not need to plaster his movie with ads for actual companies. The fact that the ads were for actual 21st centurty companies did not add to the plot, it only added to the mountain of evidence that spielberg is a frightened director.
He is afraid to trust his audience to understand an advertisement without an existing company. Who would not have understood that he was in a clothes store when the gap commercial plays? He is also afraid to trust the intelligence of his audience, hence the 5 minute explanation for what we just saw and the overwhelming message that "everything is ok" at the end of the film. It was bad enough that his boss made the big speech at the end, but the voiceover and the ads really brought this movie down.
I can't remember what PKH short story it was in--I thought it was a story included in the Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford--but it included a depiction of advertisements of the future, beamed behind into your eye on spaceflights so that even when you closed them, the advertisement was all you could see. If it isn't content that is nothing more than cleverly dressed adverts, it will be adverts that you are strapped down to watch.
Destroy your television now, while you still can! It is trying to control your behaviour! BWAHAHAHAHAHA. Man, I forgot how much I liked PKD's works. Perfect reading for the fanatic, paranoid, 20-something, college-student, experimenting things they shouldn't be, slashdot demographic. Should be popular with all the wierdo's around here.
This sig is false.
I KNOW Microsoft will responsible for bringing this crappy world into the future.
Microsoft will buy out the government, and together, they will go to work making our future possible. The world you see in the theaters (Bladerunner, The Fifth Element, Star Wars, Minority Report, etc.) is all made possible by Microsoft.
The problem today is that be have too much competition making it hard for to develop common standards. But if every company worked under one head-honcho (Microsoft) we can still have competition but all based around one common infrastructure!
So basically, everything will be Microsoft brand, but will have the design brand name on it. Like that Lexus car in Minority Report... According to my view, it would have been a Lexus car with the Bose sound system, Nokia phone system, and the AT&T wireless network... all built tightly around a special Microsoft based system, which also runs perfectly with the house OS, street OS, street sign OS, emergency OS, etc. Since every part of the world is built around Microsoft's OS, everything will run flawlessly!!!
Linux Penguin is the devil of 2050!
Am I right?!?!
Even worse, the export version of the film had a different restaurant chain, because Taco Bell is US only.
when the movies cost that much to make and with his clout that nearly ensures that millions will watch it - the combo makes for the need for supplemental income and ads love the eyballs.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
"We need personalized ads, like Minority Report. And we need them now. I want ads like that in our malls by next year!"
Spielberg didn't direct Back to the Future. Roger Zemeckis did. Spielberg was executive producer, which means "person who endorses the production of the movie and has high-level input but otherwise does nothing."
I would rate it right up with Chimay
How about commenting on that: advertising disguised as news?
Are you even aware how completely self-referential you're being?
Yes sir Mr PHB we'll get right on it.
:)
1 year later, millions of research dollars are gone with no results.
Cool ads if you can afford to wait for them.
Or if you can afford the $7 to see the movie..
The Middle Eastern countries I can understand, but France? Denmark? Sweden? What's the problem there? And does anyone seriously think that residents of those countries are going to heed some stupid "thou shalt not" like this? Do authorities in European nations actually attempt to enforce whatever laws are making this notice necessary?
It looks like you're writing a suicide note! Click on the method you're planning to use: [gun] [jump] [drown] [other] [etc]
One of the funniest damn things I've seen in awhile.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
why not just wear sunglasses? Facial recognition systems in airports today are rendered useless by sunglasses, a hat, a smile or facial hair (Popular Science).
You may be at +5 funny, but knowing some scummy marketers in my lifetime, I'd moderate this as +5 "frighteningly close to reality".
the AC
Butterscotch is not my favourite flavour
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
So, people already have to pay extra to buy products that have logos on them and whatnot, so are we going to have to pay extra to see movies that are filled to the brim with advertisements? And will old movies that are being peckered with digital product placements going to raise in cost for us too? The golden gate bridge toll was just raised to 5 bucks so why not.
After watching Minory Report I had a bad feeling about the future. Sure, some of the gadgets were fun to watch, and the cars looked great, but the advertising really got to me. I mean, how would you opt-out of advertising like that? No matter what you do, you're identifiable, regardless of whether your eyelids are open or closed. That scares me.
As a kid, seeing the Burger King, Texaco, and Pizza Hut ad placement in Back to the Future really made me say wow! It'd be sweet to have a Mattel hoverboard! But now, it's just disturbing, seeing the way Minority Report uses it. And it's more scary to think that it could really happen. The technology and the nutty advertisers are there. It just takes a little more loss of personal freedoms before we'll accept this sort of invasive advertising.
I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind last night, and that movie, too, has plenty of advertising and product placement. I don't object to that product placement at all (well, maybe I do, but only in some of the newer Bond films) because it allows me to identify with the people in the ads.
Science fiction has always meant to comment on the present more than predict the future. Pretty much ALL science fiction becomes dated, but that doesn't make them bad. Minority Report is VERY relevant to our world today, and that is what it's trying to be.
Maybe not. Face recognition technology is probably good enough for advertising.
I found it strange that Washington D.C. of all places ... one well known for its large black population and its folks from other races would have 99% white people in it. Take a look for yourself, around the pool, in the mall, in the cars, in the jail, everywhere public ... white people.
Go ahead and make up scenarios for yourself to explain this phenomenon.
our written thoughts are gifts to our future selves
Here is a pic.
Random is the New Order.
and why was this posted? that was a seriously disappointing download. yeah, i like the beer and all, but did that really warrant a post on /.? must be a slow day today.
I actualy spent good money to watch this crap, It was like watching tv for all the commercialism. Plus the movie sucked after the first 20 min. They could have dubbed it over like an old kungfoo movie and it would have been better... Let me tell ya after the movie was over I could'a used a drink myself.....
....Guinness
I had the unfortunate experience of seeing this movie earlier today. As Walt Disney has learned, it's gotten awful difficult to show the future and seem realistic in your portrayal. That's why Tomorrowland at Disneyworld has gone from being a vision of the future to being a 'retro future'. There is one thing I have learned today. If Minority Report is a valid indicator of things to come, the future will be marked by an incredibly kludgy user interface, combining the worst of all worlds. Users stand away from the screen/wall flailing their arms to move from file to file, from picture to picture. We will also leave the age of networking, as Tom Cruise and others were forced to physically 'sneaker net' the clear, floppy disk reminiscent, data sources... plugging them discretely into each separate piece of computing muscle.
Back to the Future is Robert Zemeckis' film, not Spielberg's.
...and "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial" (1982) key scene where the film's main human character, 9-year-old Elliott, lured E.T. of the woods with Reese's Pieces...
According to legend, the scene was originally suppose to use M&M's. However, Mars, the candy's manufacturer, refused to allow their name to be used -- and so Hershey's Reese's Pieces ended up being featured instead. According to the link above, sales of Reese's Pieces increased something like 65-85% afterwards.
> Was it another 'real-life' chain, or a made up one?
:-)
It was a chain owned by the same company that owns Taco Bell, I remember that much from the stories at the time (about the logos being digitally replaced). I only saw the movie on TV, and that still had "Taco Bell".
One quick Google later: http://www.yum.com/ says Pizza Hut and Taco Bell (and KFC) are owned by the same group ("Yum! Brands", formerly Tricon Global Restaurants). Pizza Hut being in Demolition Man rings a bell. And looking a bit deeper, both Taco Bell and Pizza Hut were owned by PepsiCo, which also sounds familiar.
http://uk.imdb.com/Trivia?0106697 confirms it. I should have looked there in the first place. In fact _you_ should have looked there in the first place
rant