Blog 5: Products in Movies

Hello people,

How is everything going? I hope you are doing well. You guys probably already know that I loved movies, that is why one my main goals with this blog is to talk about marketing related to movies, not only how movies advertise themselves, but how people advertise inside a movie. This post is about this last one, how you can advertise inside a movie or a TV show. Well, the easiest way possible is to put a character using some kind of a product, let’s say Marty Mcfly is putting his Nike Air MAGs with self-tying properties (called Power Lace System) and the camera focus on his feet showing clearly Nike’s name and logo, and then the movie goes on. You can just be thinking that this is normal is just a little thing in a movie, but it is not. This is an advertisement made by Nike and you can bet that they paid a lot of money to put this in Back To The Future 2.

This technique is called Product Placement and it is a really common and powerful tool that the marketing industry uses to influence people to buy their products. Alright, let’s get the hard part out of the way, let’s talk about the definition, so then we can start focus on good and famous examples, basically the funny part. Product Placement is a type of advertising in which a branded products and services are in full display during a drama production, it could be a movie, a TV Show, among others. The goal of this technique is to generate in the consumers a kind of a positive feeling towards the products that are mentioned, discussed or shown throughout the program. This affects the consumer decision process, because it can make the consumers to develop a more strong connection to the product, since their favorite characters are using that brand. Now, I will show you a lot of examples of this technique. I just need to say something; I could spend this whole post talking about Back To The Future franchise, because there are so many product placement is those movies (DeLorean, Texaco, Pizza Hut, Mattel, Black & Decker, among others), however I am not going to do that, I will try to focus in different movies and TV Shows. Ok, I just need to say that the Pepsi future bottle in this movie is pretty cool, I still do not understand why Pepsi did not made this bottle yet.

Now, let’s start talking about other programs. One of my favorite TV show nowadays is Arrow and in this show there is a lot of Windows product placement, every time you can see someone using a windows tablet or laptop, it is unbelievable.

There are a lot of other great examples; Reese’s Pieces made a product placement on the movie ET, one of the most iconic and classic movies in the history. This action made the profits of Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces to go up 65%.

There are some situations in which brands appear in the movie, but they did not pay for it. One of the most famous examples about this is the movie Cast Away; two brands come to mind, if you already watched this movie, Wilson and FedEx. First, Wilson did not pay to be in the movie, but this is understandable, it was kind of a character of the movie, but it was just a product. However, FedEx got airplanes, a lot of delivery boxes, employees and even the CEO of the company in the movie, and they did not pay. Ok, I will repeat that, they did not give a penny to be in this movie. The story behind it, it’s that they were concern about giving they brand image, because of the plane accident, but in the end they allowed the movie to used it. With that they ended up getting a lot more brand awareness especially outside of the United States.

There are a lot of different examples, if you want to see more, this video show some great ecamples of product placement in movies, some of them I talked about in this post.

Thanks for reading this post; I hope you liked it. Feel free to comment and say any other product placement that you remember. See you next time.

Take care,

Leo.

Reference:

http://theweekmagazine.tumblr.com/post/37716365399/hersheys-reeses-pieces-saw-a-reported-65-jump

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/product-placement.asp

http://mentalfloss.com/article/18383/stories-behind-10-famous-product-placements

http://static.businessinsider.com/image/51915140ecad046a07000002/image.jpg

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIt5y89tXB9lJi7Yc7MhNWfFXyha8AX0sHjTpTIfj7saIEkL81mpNAVHb06NMWFPSR478RbgGs6WBXpKeR27dBT8s3av190bISkaaTHJuyb1o2R5HJaXm4AcLyAzqt-mB4CD60c4eMM3s/s1600/arrow-se4-episodefour-monitorc-710640.png

http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mckulvrD821rjm87po1_500.jpg

https://etsucfaa.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/bttf_shoes1.jpg

http://www.brandstories.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/fedex-castaway-tom-hanks-brand-story.png