Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2011. Its picture of Apple and Google as the two companies with the biggest Hollywood deals reflects 2011.
Smart marketing, or luxury marketing: product placement is Hollywood’s open secret. This kind of marketing, available to very few companies, drives changes in fashion and habits all over the world. It is designed to work with full effectiveness while going unnoticed by the consumer (here, the viewer), heading straight for our brain and triggering our unconscious urge to consume.
The first industry to “donate” billions to Hollywood was tobacco, in exchange for showing “tough guys” with a cigarette, so that the impressionable viewer felt the need for that same cigarette, ideally the same brand. Tobacco was a symbol of seduction and sensuality in the hands of Marilyn Monroe, who was reportedly paid more than 4 million dollars to smoke on screen. Years later, other companies adopted product placement as the best and most effective form of marketing. Which search engine do you use? Which mobile phone do you have? Which car would you like to own, and what clothes do you wear?
A company’s shares used to soar when its flagship product was going to appear in a blockbuster. That was the case with Nokia when it became known that Keanu Reeves would use one of its phones in The Matrix.
The two big companies that currently hold multimillion-dollar contracts with Hollywood are Apple and Google. If you pay attention, in 95% of films, when someone searches the internet, it’s usually Google on the screen, and when a character uses a laptop, it usually has the apple on it.
Word has it that Hollywood has received huge sums from gym chains, which would explain why our screen heroes are bursting out of their shirts with muscle (that, and the fact that tobacco was banned from the screen).
If the tough guy of the past was Clint Eastwood (cigar in mouth), today’s tough guy is Vin Diesel (athlete).
The Fast and the Furious has built a business worth billions around tuning and car accessories.
Clothing brands are another industry that takes advantage of this kind of smart marketing, supplying their garments and even paying production companies so that actors and actresses wear their designs.
People who admit they prefer the taste of Pepsi and still drink Coca-Cola are one of the clearest examples of what a good marketing campaign can achieve. Those Coca-Cola signs you see in the background, visible on screen for about 2 seconds, are what make you remember the brand when you go to buy a soft drink, or at least that’s what they’re trying to do.
Another rumour concerns Martini, who negotiated with Hollywood to get James Bond to switch his famous “shaken, not stirred” drink for a Martini. But changing more than 30 years of habit in this character must have been very expensive for the company, and in the end James Bond kept his old ways. Had they reached a deal, Martini would probably have seen its sales soar.
“Marketing is about showing that people don’t make their own decisions. A person doesn’t decide what they want to eat or how they want to dress, but they don’t want to be sold to either. They want the false feeling that they themselves are choosing a product, when we already know what they will choose before they do. Submissive potential consumers before an industry that rules their minds. Welcome to product placement.” (Someone once used these words.)
Featured image: Mundanemetal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
