This week Neil Calloway looks at the benefits of brands appearing in films…
I thought the peak of award season was always the Oscars, and I imagine you did too. Turns out I’m wrong; there is also the Brandcameo Product Placement Awards.
Given out yearly, the awards “honour” films for their use of brands, and brands for their use in films. They are not entirely serious, and it could be said that they are a sly dig at the paid use of brands in movies.
This year, Apple won the award for “Overall Product Placement”, with its products appearing, or named in, 9 out of the 35 movies that topped the US Box Office in 2014. The other big award is the Achievement in Product Placement in a Single Film, won this year by Transformers: Age of Extinction, with appearances by 55 brands, seven ahead of its nearest rival, Gone Girl.
I was quite surprised that so many brands appeared in Gone Girl; call me a bad viewer but I didn’t really notice them. The press release that accompanies the list of awards pointed out its use of Apple and Starbucks products, but given that the film is set in the modern day US, it would probably be more noticeable if characters didn’t have an iPhone or occasionally get a coffee from Starbucks. I did wonder, however, given the fact that very few characters in Gone Girl have many redeeming features (Kim Dickens’s detective being the exception), why a company would want to be associated with them; it is as if they are saying “buy our product, it’s what sociopaths use.”
Product placement does not have to be a bad thing. A film where all the characters drink non branded cola drinks and use a generic smartphone and a fake search engine would be as jarring to watch as a film where the characters kept mentioning their iPhones and Pepsi. Products get the kudos of being associated with a film, and in some cases the film gets publicity tie in adverts; a new Bond film is always accompanied by a slew of adverts; for cars, watches, gadgets, that are used in the film. Heineken paid £28 million to be featured in Skyfall; no film studio is going to ignore that sort of cash, and it also has the ancillary benefit of a little publicity when it is revealed that 007 will be drinking something other than a vodka martini. I would advise against drinking a Heineken shaken, not stirred.
Duncan Jones explicitly acknowledged the financial aspect of product placement when he was asked who uses Bing after its appearance in Source Code – by far and away the most unrealistic aspect of the time travel movie where a man relives eight minutes of someone else’s life over and over again – when he said “people who want money to make their movie look better use Bing.” If a character has to use a search engine in a film, why not make it one that’s paid you to use it?
It’s possible, but unlikely that you could find three directors as different as Michael Bay, Ken Burns and Shane Meadows, yet all three have used product placement or sponsorship. Bay uses it in his big, bombastic blockbusters, Shane Meadows had his 2008 feature Somers Town entirely funded by Eurostar, it being set in the area around their terminal at St Pancras station, and the London to Paris trains make an unobtrusive appearance in the film’s finale. Meadows got the money to make a film, Eurostar got to be associated with an acclaimed director. Everyone is a winner. Similarly Ken Burns, probably the best documentary maker working today, uses sponsorship for his documentary series. His latest, The Roosevelts, was sponsored by the Bank of America. This doesn’t mean a big logo is put into the background of a photo of Theodore Roosevelt in the series, but it is mentioned at the beginning of each episode. Like Meadows, Burns gets money to make his series, and the bank get to be associated with a prestigious product. Everybody wins.
The Product Placement Awards are a bit of fun, and remind us of a side of the film industry we some studios might like us to forget; the commercials don’t stop when the film starts. Done subtly, it often works, and I’m sure we’ve all bought a product or a service after it featured in a film, but film makers need to be careful not to overwhelm us with it; more than twenty years on, Wayne’s World, with its scene poking fun at product placement while its characters talk about selling out, remains the perfect skewering of it being done badly. Done well and we all win; the film gets money towards its budget, the product gets a nice advert, and the consumer gets a new shiny toy associated with a hit film.
This year, it’s the people who work to get products placed in films I feel sorry for; the most anticipated film of the year is set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. If you see a Stormtrooper using an iPad, the person responsible doesn’t just deserve a Brandcameo Award, they deserve an Oscar.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future installments.
