More Product Placement...

The relationship between popular drama and advertising has always been an interesting one (the term soap opera is derived from a time where soap manufacturers such as Procter and Gamble and Lever would sponsor daytime radio dramas). In the new Tesco advert featuring Martin Clunes and Fay Ripley, product placement is taken to its logical conclusion as the unfolding ‘drama’ is peppered with a massive and painfully obvious list of product placements – as this is an advertisement, we can laugh all knowingly. However, when advertisers start paying for product placements within established programmes, then something different starts to happen:

From Adbusters 76 (volume 16, number 2):

Advertisers spent almost $1 billion in 2005 in getting their goods displayed in television shows. That figure is expected to quadruple by 2010. In the first half of 2007 alone, an astonishing 110,296 products turned up in cable television’s top 20 shows according to Nielsen Media Research.

In a world where it’s becoming increasingly easier for viewers to block out TV adverts, advertisers have obviously got to find a way of getting their products in front of us difficult to please consumers – and what better way to do it than to pay for a series of product placements within your favourite programme?

A problem arises when the advertiser starts dictating the content of the programme that he wants that product placement in – witness the fetid old guff that was Perfect Stranger. That said, when something like the below comes along, I can forgive any advertiser just about anything...

Cry Baby

Here is an oldish but excellent article in The Guardian by Charlotte Higgins on how blubbing at the theatre has somehow become a cultural faux pas. The theatre I can do without, but blubbing? My life would be severely limited if I had to avoid things that made me blub like the great Gazza.

· That Cancer Research ad with a muzak version of Sting’s Fields of Gold tinkling away in the background (yes, Sting, for Christ’s sake – Sting! Stun gun me now!).

· Come to think of it, any Cancer Research ad.

· Any programme that bears a passing resemblance to Children’s Hospital. I don’t have kids and don’t want any, but this doesn’t stop me howling whenever I have the misfortune to tune in to something like it.

· And talking of hospitals, how about Animal Hospital? Come to think of it, any programme that involves pet euthanasia...

· The Secret Millionaire – it’s weird (maybe because you don't see it on television very often), but basic human kindness in any form makes me grizzle like a four year old.

· There was a documentary some time ago about the children’s charity Barnardo’s. Within twenty minutes I was a complete emotional wreck and had to be helped from the room by a team of paramedics.

· Music – everything from Nick Drake to Kevin Drew is guaranteed to make me snivel and get all bunged up.

· Films? Don’t get me started – I’ll blub at anything and everything. Bambi? Check. Shrek? Been there. The Abyss? A big tick in the box. A Matter of Life and Death? The last time I watched it, it took all weekend to recover. Enchanted? I cried like a six year old all the way through it.

· England 24 – France 13. Yup, you guessed it – at the end of the game I cried.

All in all, you can guarantee that whatever the medium (theatre being the sole exception, where I think you need a good deal more ‘suspension of disbelief’ than with any other medium), I will blub on cue every single time: so much in fact so that it has become a standing joke at Chipster Towers. Whenever I sit through anything that might threaten an attack of the snivels, my wife always checks to see whether or not I’m misting up. And if I am, she has a damn good laugh. It’s also difficult to know whether or not I’m being emotionally manipulated, because I will basically cry at anything.

That said, I watched Ocean’s Thirteen the other night and cried most of the way through that - but not because it was a particularly emotional experience ;-)

Fun with Product Placement

Contains Spoilers for Perfect Stranger

A few years back, I used to work for a large Champagne house. Every now and again, we’d get requests from film production companies asking us if we’d like our product to feature in their film – all for an exorbitant fee of course, which they would use to offset the cost of production. I’m all for imaginative movie financing such as this, not that it really got anyone anywhere. At the time, Champagne sales were riding high – the French couldn’t produce enough of the stuff (it is a finite product, after all), so why would anyone want to advertise to sell more? The stuff essentially sold itself.

This is something you almost certainly couldn’t say about Perfect Stranger, which plays as if someone has dropped eighty half-written thriller plot points into a huge food processor and simply hit the ‘splurge’ button, not caring what was poured out or what it looked like. The one notable thing about it is the amount of product placement on show. And as this is a film set partially in the world of advertising, that means there’s an absolute rampage of brands queuing up to get their fifteen seconds of A-list Hollywood exposure. Reebok, Match.com, Victoria’s Secret, Heineken, Sony – plus a few others I probably missed.

It’s bad enough when any film starts down this route, but when it’s in your face as much as it is here, it actually starts to disrupt the very narrative that it helped pay for. For instance, Harrison Hill (Bruce Willis), hot shot advertising honcho and prime suspect in the murder of Halle Berry’s arch-nemesis in a plot too convoluted to give a flying arse about, introduces a Victoria’s Secret show (replete with Heidi Klum co-hosting). All this sequence said to me was that there was no way a brand like Victoria’s Secret was going to let their fictitious fashion show be introduced by a cold blooded murderer, imagined or not. Ka-thunk went a major plank of the narrative, and with it my interest.

Watching Perfect Stranger, I’m sure there’s a correlation to be drawn between quite how bad a film is and the amount of product placement shoehorned into it – Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, anyone? That said, my favourite ever product placement moment – if you can call it that – occurs in Blue Velvet. Our hero’s (Jeffrey Beaumont) favourite tipple is Heineken. At one point in the film, the unpredictable and deranged psychopath Frank Booth asks, ‘What kind of beer do you like to drink, neighbour?’ ‘Heineken,’ Jeffrey replies, uncertain as to whether this is the right answer. ‘Heineken?’ roars Frank, ‘Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!’

Cough Syrup

Nick Drake’s 1972 album Pink Moon is 28 minutes of the most beautifully desolate music you will ever hear - it was his last release before he died of a drugs overdose two years later at the age of 26. Its last track is From the Morning, which contains the lines, ‘now we rise and we are everywhere’, which now seems remarkably and scarily prescient. These are the lines that are also on Drake’s gravestone.

In a seemingly unrelated development, From the Morning is the incidental music to the new Vicks cough syrup advert.

Run for your lives. It’s the end of civilisation as we know it.