Product placement in advertising

One of my students wrote a research proposal about product placement in movies. Reading it got me thinking. Some commercials, some of the best, feature the sponsor's product as an incidental part of the narrative.

A couple come very quickly to mind, Flat Eric for Levis and skating priests for Stella Artois. My interpretation of the charmingly existential Levis ad is that non-iron chinos could be cool - whereas they might have been perceived as naff before the campaign. The Stella commercial is a part of the superb campaign that understates the overstatement of the postioning 'reassuringly expensive'. The performances are brilliant, the casting superb and all of the craftwork employed in the making as good as any film. What genius to have the product inherent in the story but never overtly touted.

Flat Eric: Levis, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, 1999.

Skating Priests: Stella Artois, Lowe London

Both are evidence that commuication with a degree of subtlety is far more engaging than urgent 'buy my product now' messages. They also reinforce the wonderful presentation by Amsterdam based planner Jeffre Jackson of OIA on the subject of interestingness. "Nobody reads/watches ads, they read/watch what interests them." - Howard Gossage

What do you think?

Comments

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer

ThoughtSpurs

Search This Blog