In 1980, James Uys produced a little movie called “The Gods Must Be Crazy. The plot was about a primitive tribe from Namibia whose world is turned upside down when an airplane pilot drops a bottle of Coca Cola in their midst. This strange and exotic object causes deep divisions within the once-idyllic tribe, prompting them to appoint a warrior to take the strange object and return it from whence it came. The plot covers all this and the wacky adventures that follow when he tries to return a disposable object to our so-called civilization.
Fast forward to 2001. BMW commissions a series of internet shorts (each one about 8 minutes long) directed and acted by major Hollywood talent such as Guy Ritchie and Clive Owen. The shorts were so well-made that people downloaded them and passed them around to each other. Effectively, BMW had created a series of ads that people wanted to see.
Cue to last week. I happened to read Sarah Carr’s unflattering review, in this very publication, about a movie called “Bahr El Nogoum (Sea of Stars). The movie was produced by Pepsi and is little more than a cynical attempt to market their carbonated soda drink by making a two-hour ad disguised as a movie.
Sea of stars? It was very evident Sarah would have been happier spending the running time of this movie in a sea of starfish.
When a movie or a TV show or a music video shows a real world product in the course of the story, it’s called product placement. Sometimes, the reason this product appears is artistic: by showing a real product, the viewer is made to feel that the events of the movie took place in the same world they inhabit. In other words, it adds realism within the narrative. On other occasions, the appearance of a product in a film is based on little more than an opportunity to gain extra exposure.
Product placement has three issues that have been much discussed within contemporary media circles:
1. Consumers have become so attuned to any attempt to sell them anything, that the appearance of a real product in what is supposed to be a work of fiction, creates a jarring effect, taking them out of the flow of the movie, which compromises the effectiveness of the sell.2. One of the reasons people go to the movies is to escape the endless barrage of advertising they encounter on TV. When they’re confronted with a gratuitous piece of product placement at a time when they don’t expect it, research shows that instead of having positive or indifferent feelings about the product, they actually resent this encroachment.3. Hijacking a creative/artistic medium, like the movies, in order to sell a product is, simply put, the kind of consumerism that the arts is supposed to rail against.
The first two points speak to the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of product placement. The last point delves into the ethics of using product placement at all. I mean, it’s clearly a despicable thing, right?
The answer to that would be yes, if it hasn’t been happening since the first prehistoric advertising executive crawled out of his cave and used the least hairy female he knew to model a new line of fur clothing.
The truth is, it’s always been about selling. When radio came out in the 1920s, the networks wanted to fill the entire airtime with advertising messages. It was only after one bright spark at the network (sorry about that) convinced his bosses that people were more likely to tune in if they produced interesting programs to lure them in.
In the 1970s, the US Congress investigated the effect of subliminal advertising (flashing messages at speeds that exceeded the eye’s ability to read them, reputedly caused viewers to be influenced by the messages they contained, even if they couldn’t read them). Subliminal messaging continues to be banned today.
Everyone agrees that the world is getting too commercial and to a lot of people, product placement represents a step too far.
So is there a line we can draw for product placement? Perhaps.
In the first example I gave, the bottle of Coca Cola was a legitimate plot device, put there to add to the satirical undertones of the movie. In the second example, the selling is a little bit more blatant, but at least the movies were free and you had a choice not to see them. Where product placement starts to get hairy is when advertisers strike deals with movie studios (or more recently, music artists and even video games) to embed their products within the creative message, for no other reason than to promote them.
That to me, is obscenity personified. You know what else is obscene? The price of the Daily News Egypt relative to its impressively varied content.sorry about that.
Mohammed Nassar was kidnapped at birth and forced to work in advertising, in Cairo, New York and London. Today, his main concern is that archaeologists will one day stumble upon his desk, debate the value of his profession and judge him.