And the brand played on The movie world

And the brand played on

The movie world's $1bn sideline in product placement is taking on ever more tricksy forms. Andrew Mueller finds that the smartest brands now don't always do what they say on the can

Saturday June 30, 2001
The Guardian

Remaining awake during a film as awesomely stupid, predictable and tedious as Tomb Raider is like yomping unassisted across the Brecon Beacons - an unpleasant and arduous slog for which one must be properly prepared. If deluded into seeing this wholly worthless picture by the fact that everyone else has been, or if dragged along by a nagging younger relative, you will require a carefully thought-out strategy to help you endure what will be one of the longest 100 minutes of your life.

A diversion that might help you limp through to the end credits is mentally logging the film's prodigious product placements: the UPS messenger, the Ericsson mobile phone, the barely driven Aston Martin, McLaren, Mini and Land Rover cars, the Sony laptop, among many others that doubtless made an appearance while this correspondent was catching the odd 40 winks. Product placement is an industry worth $1bn annually, the corporate plug as inevitable a part of any mainstream movie as the happy ending. However, a subtle shift is occurring in the nature of their deployment.

Tomb Raider, quite aside from raising the bar by being, essentially, one gigantic advertisement for the video game of the same name, places its products in what might be described as a postmodern manner, accompanying each plug with an implicit or explicit smirk. It is as if the film's producers are hoping that if they acknowledge their sponsors in a sufficiently wry fashion, they will pre-empt the audience's recognition that they are being subjected to a fairly crass series of commercials. In Tomb Raider, Ericsson's big moment comes when Lara Croft's phone won't work because it is wet, Sony's logo is most prominent when the laptop crashes, and the cars generally get one loving, slightly over-long shot each before being spectacularly pulverised.

Films and television series have long been defraying their production costs by offering cameo parts to recognisable brands of clothes, soft drink, motor vehicle or electronic equipment and any other props they think they might be able to get for zero financial outlay - at this very minute, the producers of Hollywood's next Middle Eastern shoot-'em-up are probably wandering the arms bazaars of Darra Adam Khel, in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, offering some beturbanned miscreant a spot in the credits in return for a gross of AK-47s.

The plugs used to be relatively straightforward, usually perfectly credible, incorporations of the product into the plot - think of Michael J Fox's fondness for Pepsi and Nikes in Back To The Future, or James Bond's Aston Martins - but they have now, as in Tomb Raider, become an end in themselves, an in-joke we are expected to laugh along with.

Dr Evil plotted in a citadel plastered with Starbucks logos in The Spy Who Shagged Me. Wayne and Garth ended a tirade against product placement in Wayne's World by flipping open Pizza Hut cartons. Castaway and You've Got Mail might as well have given above-title billing to, respectively, FedEx and AOL - the latter is reputed to be the most expensive product placement contract in cinematic history. In Pearl Harbor, Coca-Cola bottles are used to collect blood for transfusions (which, one might grudgingly concede, is a credible enough period detail).

So, does a corporate plug masquerading as a plot development become any less cynical or annoying just because it is acknowledged as such? If anyone knows, it is Eric E Dahlquist, president of the Entertainment Resources and Marketing Association. The Burbank-based Erma, founded in 1991, is an umbrella association of lm studios, production companies and product placement agencies - an industry equivalent, as Dahlquist explains it, of the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association.

Intriguingly, when asked to name a poor use of product placement, Dahlquist hits immediately upon one of the new ironists.

"Austin Powers, actually," he says. "And I remember the jokes in Wayne's World, as well. Mike Myers seems to have a real thing about product placement. But maybe I'm just sensitive."

A good product placement, as Dahlquist explains it, should be something like a good waiter or a good referee - something you don't really notice.

"The best ones are those which are seamless," he says, "which present a realistic picture of life as we've lived it, but not to the point of intruding into the dramatic content of the film. You don't want to jolt the viewer. You mentioned the Coke bottles in Pearl Harbor - if those are a historical fact, or at least believable as a historical fact, then that works. If they were bottles of Mountain Dew, which didn't exist at the time, then that wouldn't."

There is a perfectly reasonable argument that there is nothing wrong with product placement at all. If these brands and products are a part of our lives, there is no reason why they shouldn't be part of movies - any cinematic landscape based remotely in fact from which every logo had been removed would look absurd. The real clash between art and Mammon comes, Dahlquist points out, when a plot calls for a recognisable product malfunctioning in some way (in almost any hijack or air disaster film, the aeroplane involved will be sprayed in the livery of a non-existent airline). Tomb Raider excepts itself from this rule on a number of occasions; Castaway, famously, did so once.

"There was a big discussion in the industry about Castaway showing that FedEx plane going down," says Dahlquist. "I spoke to people from DHL and UPS, and both categorically said they wouldn't have allowed that."

So what if your script calls for, say, a car accident in which the airbag doesn't work?

"You go and buy an older car that didn't have airbags. Most major car companies have strict criteria as regards how their cars are going to be used, and an absolute prohibition on them being used in a negative way - safety-related devices especially have to be depicted as working perfectly."

Whatever the effect it may have on the movies we watch, product placement is not going to go away - it works. BMW paid $3m to get James Bond to drive their Z3 convertible in GoldenEye, and took $240m in advance sales. Sales of Ray-Ban sunglasses were dramatically filliped by Men In Black, as they had previously been by Risky Business. Red Stripe's sales jumped 53% after Tom Cruise drank the beer in The Firm. Toy Story put the manufacturers of Slinky stair-climbing toys back in business.

Indeed, with a billion dollars' worth of economic clout annually, what is far more likely is that the phenomenon will spread to other media. The day will surely come when, if a character on television is wearing a jacket that appeals to us, we need only click on it with our remote control mouse to have our credit card charged and the goods delivered to our door. And there is little doubt that an ever-wider array of auteurs will be willing to spangle their work with brand names in the hope of a free sample or a few bob up front.

This article was written on an Apple iMac computer by a journalist wearing Converse sneakers, Levi's jeans, a Hawaiian shirt by Mambo, and listening to music on equipment from Technics - and who believes, incidentally, that the quality of his future work would be improved immeasurably by a Coffee Classic espresso machine from Gaggia.