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Digital Tech and the Re-Birth of Product Placement
pbahra writes "When you think of product placement on television you tend to think of cumbersome 1950s examples where the actor would cheesily turn to camera and hold up, say, a bar of soap—where do you think the sobriquet soap opera came from—to deliver his line. Perhaps to save all of us the artistic murder, the practice was prohibited in Europe, but recently the prohibition has been relaxed and a U.K. start up is offering digital producers the chance to inject products realistically in post production with full directorial control. The problem with existing physical product placement is that there are no clear business plans, and the process is incredibly slow. In Europe, legal constraints prohibit directors from re-writing scripts to include products, so any placement has to be done at the creative stage."
We've had this in the U.S. for ages, and the only side-effect that I've noticed is that I can't stop thinking about delicious, delicious fast food products. I recommend that you just relax and let the placements do their work. If you try to fight it, it'll just give you a really nasty headache. Then you'll have to take Tylenol-brand pain reliever, washed down with a refreshing Coca-Cola.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
say how cool something is and the cult will buy it
I think he needs to do a little more research on the origin of "soap opera".
might I suggest a connection to laundry soap?
Product placement isn't bad when it works with the story. For example, a horror movie isn't ruined because at a party they have a box of Pizza Hut pizza and are playing on a PS3. On the other hand, bad product placement can ruin character development, for example, showing what is supposed to be a poor family having a top-of-the line Mac in their kitchen.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I don't understand banning the practice. It's not like television is the pinnacle of high-brow culture, needing protection from the poisoning corruption of consumerism. I doubt it's that much different in Europe.
... any placement has to be done at the creative stage
Does this mean Citizen Kane and the sled manufacturer are OK or not OK?
ET and his Texas Instruments Speak and Spell are OK or not OK?
Jurassic Park and the kid who knows unix because it has a 3-d file browser are OK or not OK?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
According to wikipedia: "The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers ... as sponsors and producers." So it has nothing to do with product placement and predates TV.
digitize any brand in later for who ever pays the most .
George Lucas, is that you?
Lex: "It's a Unix System, conforming to the Single Unix Specification of the Open Group! Unix is a registered trademark of the Open Group, and not to be used as a generic term! I know this!"
I've seen a lot of General Motors commercials. And they were all better than Transformers 2.
Paul Newman put a clause in his will that prohibits any "virtual performance or reanimation of any performance by me by the use of any technique, technology or medium now in existence or which may be known or created in the future anywhere in the universe."
So no Paul Newman dancing with a vacuum cleaner a la Fred Astaire.
Which is a good thing.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Product placement happens in a lot of movies and you generally don't notice it. It just means instead of a product being generic or having the label hidden, it'll have a brand on it. Not only is it not offensive, but it can make things seem more real. An example of it being well done is Dell product placement in V for Vendetta. All that they did was not cover the logos on the computers and monitors. They are actual Dell systems used, mostly by the police, and you can see that in the background. They don't call any attention to it, the products are just, well, placed.
It is only a problem when they try to shove it in your face somehow.
Personally I think we should just categorize things differently. Product placement means having a product placed inside a show, as in there doing what it would be doing in normal life. Advertising is something being shoved in your face.
What can be more creative than to put a bottle of c*k* on a table of the Mos Eisley Cantina?
Cool!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Did you only read the headline? You don't even have to read the article, just the summary at the top of the page. This is about Europe where restrictions have been in place are being relaxed. Transformers was produced in the USA where there has never been any kind of restriction.
I've seen piles of steaming dog feces that were better than Transformers 2. Michael Bay needs to have his cameras taken away. The man is the most incompetent director in the history of Hollywood. Even Ed Wood made more watchable films.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
SO... movies should be written with characters that never drink soda, never go to a Starbucks, never eat anything other than what they harvested out of the back yard. They don't drive cars made by real corporations, ride buses that actually exist, nor wear clothes that look like anything we, real people, wear. And they don't live in actual cities or town, indeed, they don't even live in actual nations.
Product placements are inevitable. The why is to further the story line, to derive revenue, or both. Oh, wait, movies are intended to drive revenue. There is NO OTHER REASON TO MAKE THEM.
You were hoping for art? Try focusing on dead artists who never received recognition nor revenue for their magnificent works. Lots of those. Leave the movies to those of us who seek entertainment, or indulge in appreciating excellent craft.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
...bad product placement can ruin character development, for example, showing what is supposed to be a poor family having a top-of-the line Mac in their kitchen.
Why do you think they're so poor?
Seriously, I knew a family where the dad was a starving graphic artist (small town, no big agencies or clients) and the wife was a teacher; naturally they had a Mac but ten-year-old cars. A cheaper PC wouldn't have saved them much.
I've seen a lot of paint dry and it was all better than Transformers 2.
I've dry-retched with my head in a toilet bowl and that was better than Transformers, too.
To paraphrase, Transformers isn't even bad.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Soap operas were not called that because of clumsy product placement. Yes, they were sponsored by soap companies and the content of the shows chased the housewife demographic who purchased the same. However most of them took their dramatic content far too seriously to sully themselves with the kind of idiotic product placement you describe. There were actually producers who had taste back then - just like there are those who have taste today - who would have fought to keep this kind of thing from happening.
And, in fact, if you actually look at these shows, I'd bet you'd be hard pressed to find an example of what you described. An announcer/narrator transitioning from the drama to the ad with "Now a word from our sponsors..."? Yes. A cast member in the heat of a pot-boiling dramatic scene saying something like "I wish I could wash these troubles away with the lemony-fresh scent of Palmolive Soap!" while holding up a bottle? Not so much.
You denigrate what, at the time, was as serious and professional an artistic undertaking as what goes on in dramatic TV now.
That is all.
And I'm not looking forward to his next project
Now that more and more of us are finding ways to cut out the commercials, they have to be hidden in the content.
As others have said, I don't mind if they are done "right" (and there is a fine line of course). My main concern is that this will go the same way cable TV did.
First, they rationalize that they need this because there are fewer and fewer eyeballs hitting the commercials.
Next, they will find a way to enforce the 10 minutes of commercials per 1/2 hour of programming.
???
Finally, PROFIT!
We'll finally achieve life as depicted in the Demolition Man (was that parody or just really good product placement?)
Exactly!
Look, I don't care for your brand of fast food. A hamburger is a hamburger, and a car is just a car, and generally which kind is entirely irrelevant to the story. It took me 15 minutes to remember which model of car my mother drives last time somebody asked (and I just realized I forgot again), so believe me, I don't give a damn about who drives what in a movie.
Now, a good story, that's important.
"When you think of product placement on television you tend to think of cumbersome 1950s examples where the actor would cheesily turn to camera and hold up, say, a bar of soap—where do you think the sobriquet soap opera came from—to deliver his line."
Say what? When I think of product placement on television I think in any current television show coming from the US.
tech is just adding power to existing creative tools. auteurs can still produce ad-free art if they wish, and take the risk inherent in getting people to pay for it. more commercial products can customize the product for the watcher, and thus offer content at lower prices.
consumers, for their part, can be as passive as they want, or drive development of software that preprocesses content to remove what they object to (turn all those coke cans to pepsi or guiness).
where's the problem? yes, it means that watching a movie in the future might be quite compute-intensive, but so?
the most interesting consequence is that such tech will eliminate the concept of a finished, static creative work. everything's interactive, malleable, customizable. how does copyright deal with that? the current situation with licensing for sampling music clips is not a viable way forward...
Entertainment Weekly had an article about a month ago concerning this practice in syndicated episodes of television shows.
http://insidetv.ew.com/2011/07/07/how-i-met-your-mother-reruns-bad-teacher-zookeeper/
From the article: If you’ve watched syndicated reruns of sitcom How I Met Your Mother lately, you might have been startled to see advertisements for very current movies such as Bad Teacher and Zookeeper in episodes that originally aired as early as 2006, long before those flicks were made. The photos here, for instance, are from the second-season episode titled “Swarley,” which originally aired Nov. 6, 2006 — more than four years before Bad Teacher hit theaters. So what exactly is going with this phenomenon? EW investigated, and here’s the scoop.
Turns out that 20th Television — the studio distributor behind Mother — has been selling promotional spots in syndicated episodes to wring even more money out of the sitcom’s already rich syndication deals. Specifically, the feat is accomplished by a partnership with a company, SeamBI, which stands for Seamless Brand Integration and is responsible for digitally altering old episodes with new products and brands.
The company’s CEO Roy Baharav calls SeamBI an “advertising technology innovator” and says that what they do — in essence, monetizing aging television shows by adding new brands and product placement into old episodes — is the future. “What we do is we insert, very efficiently, brands into content in a natural way and in a way that is valuable to advertisers,” Baharav says. “So we find the balance between not compromising the integrity of the content and, on the other end, bring a lot of value to the advertiser.”
When I think of product placement on television I think of Apple. They are the kings of product placement in movies and television
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
("Sobriquet"? Really?)
I like David Lynch's take on product placement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4wh_mc8hRE
by 2020 actors will just be holding object to be tracked and the TV will render new skins over the top of them (objects & actor :) ). The object they hold in the studio along with the set around them will be just as fake as the industry that pumps it out. You'll never see the same ad object twice and people in different locations will see different cans of soda. It will work like google ads. If you scrub back to watch the scene again, you'll see a different can.
If you do use this tech from this idea please donate money to something good and I'd like a house too.
Thanks
I don't mind when it's just a part of the set, but the shameless ads are what annoy me. I was watching Grown Ups (yes, I know, I know) and there's a shameless scene of logos-up Donut vendor cups being used as kids phones. Just add commercial breaks if you're going to go full-on whore.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
>When you think of product placement on television you tend to think of cumbersome 1950s examples where the actor would cheesily turn to camera and hold up, say, a bar of soap
No I don't. I think of a scene with the actors driving somewhere, and one says to the other "hey, this is that new CANYONERO with that great NAVISYNCSTAR system, isn't it?" And the dialog just gets worse from there, while the camera lingers lovingly on the vehicles console for a creepily long time.
Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious
SO... movies should be written with characters that never drink soda, never go to a Starbucks, never eat anything other than what they harvested out of the back yard.
No, they should be more realistic where every character drives the newest model of the same brand of car, everyone drinks Pepsi or Coke products exclusively, every computer is either a Mac (most likely), or a Dell, and where everyone makes sure that the logo of what they're using/eating/drinking is prominently displayed for everyone to see.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Did you only read the headline? You don't even have to read the article, just the summary at the top of the page. This is about Europe where restrictions have been in place are being relaxed. Transformers was produced in the USA where there has never been any kind of restriction.
It will be used in the US.
Someone making very similar tech showed this off at my university in 2005. He had a product-free drama from the 1990s, which he then showed with 1990s products added. He then showed the same scene again, but with 2005 products, and again with the German version of the products (i.e. labels translated).
And what if what they drive IS the story? Or what they eat, or drink, or wear?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
So what stops them from using variety of real products without the paid placement to keep things realistic?
Having a disproportionate amount of a single company's products filing a scene, or in use by characters throughout the show, is also quite noticeable. Outside of going in a company store, can you give me an example of going somewhere and having a brand image being a noticeable part of of the experience? I can't even say going into my school's computer labs, filled with desktops from a single brand of would have qualified, and that was over a course of four years.
Yet something about the camera angles, prevalence in the world, choice of local contrast, etc. makes you notice Dell in V for Vendetta, for example.
Then most of the time, it's an advertisement.
I don't know about you, but I don't define what I am by a brand. I like cranberry juice, to put an example; the brand is unimportant unless it happens to taste like crap which hasn't happened to me yet. I like coffee and ocassionally eat fast food, but just go to the nearest establishment. In fact I'd say that somebody who genuinely loves coffee wouldn't have "brand loyalty" -- they'd be trying to get every possible kind of it, prepared in every possible way.
I'd say that I work by anti-brand loyalty: I don't give a damn whichbrand is it unless I hate it for some reason.
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
No I noticed the Dell in V for Vendetta because I look for stuff like that. product placement interests me.
Can you name me a movie that would not have been made if it were not for the paid product placement? Also, the absence of paid placement does not mean an absence of real products.
is that it exists and you are not spanked to death with a paddle for it.
This is brought to you by "fuck you, I already paid for watching that flick with money and/or by watching the clearly marked and separate advertising."
Also, it does not matter if they hold up soap and grin, all people use Dell/Apple/Nokia/younameit, everyone one two and a half men drinks Radeberger or if companies in Transformers only accept one kind of CC. I like to think I notice that crap and hope others do, as well.
If anything, it leaves a negative image of the company, for me.
Lets you sell the product placement after you're done filming!
And I don't think I've ever heard anyone order a "Pepsi" in person. I've seen it on film a couple of times - Marty McFly trying to order a "Pepsi Free", and somebody telling Chase and Ackroyd "Why don't you boys have yourself a Pepsi" in Spies Like Us.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Having single brands is only noticeable if those brands are out of place. For instance, if they showed a corporate office where everyone was using a Lenovo Thinkpad, I would not think that odd at all - I see that every day at work. On the other hand, if the same scene showed everyone with an iPad, that would be extremely jarring.
Finally, Alex Cox will be able to put some brand name products into Repo Man!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Concerns about possible legal hassles involving copyright and trademark law, mostly. The same reason brand logos, etc., are often blurred out in documentaries.
I'm assuming you don't go back where you get bad product or service.
That's brand awareness.
I do rely on advertising for some awareness of what's available, and the expectation is set by the ad. If it doesn't meet that expectation. I'm less likely to go back if at all, and I'm less likely to trust the source if I can figure out who they are.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I dont instantly think 1950's tv when I think product placement, that is because it was a sponsored advertisement, the show would come to a halt for a moment, play advertisement and go back, just like today.
Product placement is when your enjoying something but notice every bike is Kawasaki and every vending machine is Pepsi, and every computer terminal you see in Jurassic Park is a Mac.
I stopped reading after the first 3 line sentence, because of this
Star Wars?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That depends on the kind of experience. Generally every brand will screw up at some point, and I generally don't pay that much attention to that. I've bought every brand of hard disk more than once, and had a disk of probably every brand go bad. Generally I buy two different brands at once and RAID them.
The cases where I really decide to permanently ignore a brand are: it''s such crap that all its products can be assumed to be (pretty rare), I know it doesn't make anything I'd want to buy (brands that only make racing cars, Apple), or companies I really don't want to give money to for some reason (Sony)
For buying stuff I get long lists of products, apply filters, and choose from what remains. For instance, my next wifi router is just based on searching in the supported devices list for DD-WRT.
I kind of find it interesting to see when a show/movie comes up with its own brands, it can make the world seem much more realized. They have products that suit their universe. For example, in "The Simpsons", they have many Krusty branded items, or Duff or Laramie, etc. Or in "Star Wars", I would never want to see a Coke or Doritos, or whatever, that's a different universe! Product placements would usually go to the highest bidder, would something like that belong in a show like Roseanne where the family can't typically afford anything but generic/store brands?
Also, don't you find it more entertaining when the writers come up with parodies of actual products, or create brands that only exist in their world? Usually they are comical, satirical, or just creative. I find that more interesting that repeats of the crap that is offensively blasted at you all day. I have a negative feeling associated with seeing real-world brands in TV shows for that reason, and find it very refreshing when I don't notice real-world brands out of the corner of my eye every time I am watching a show or movie. They're distracting no matter how much they try to make them blend in with the scene.
Twinstiq, game news
You don't have to be dead to be an artist. I've got no problem with real-world products in movies, but when you compromise the aesthetics for the sake of the advertising (perfect example: transformers has a scene where it's doing a smooth pan across a fair, then pauses for half a second or so on a screen consisting of nothing but a big Dell banner, then resumes panning) then your movie becomes less interesting to me - and you'll get less revenue as a result.
I am trolling
I am for product placement.
How many of your favorite new shows have been impatiently cancelled in the last couple of years because the first few episodes didn't meet ratings targets, and hence didn't get the requisite advertising money. eg Drive from a few years ago (cancelled after 2 ep), or the recent Chaos that was (cancelled after 3rd).
Product placement allows the Producers of the show to get paid for their advertising regardless of where/when it is viewed. This would allow "pirate" downloads of TV shows to be counted in ratings for advertising purposes and therefore supply needed funding to well made shows that have a large fanbase that don't all watch it on TV at the time you broadcast it.
I recently decided to watch Fringe after previously thinking it was going to be another cheesy pop-sci-fi show (which it is to some extent) but I rather enjoyed it.
Anyway, the characters use Apple computer as does almost any other show (I really would have figured House would use a Thinkpad or something) there was even one point where one character left a Macbook full of secrets because another character had the same fucking model.
I found it quite amusing that at one point we see some people using a computer in the alternate universe and there's a giant stonking Windows logo as the wallpaper.
That doesn't adequately address the 'product placement' in Gran Torino.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The audience for Transformers is largely oblivious to that. In fact, the more intellectual the audience, the more subtle the placement. I suspect I've seen several movies that don't fall into the 'juvenile entertainment' category that just peppered me with paid placements and I didn't even notice.
But like some who haven't responded, I make note of companies that tip the scales towards 'evil', and I avoid their products. Like I seek out products not made in China, to a lesser extent those made in Asia, or those I'm aware are made in a way that is just too ugly to tolerate. And yes, this limits my choices in clothings, shoes, and softball bats.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.