Product Placement

Over the weekend, I went to see the new Bond film, Skyfall. There’s been a lot of kerfuffle about the product placement in the film, Bond drinks Heineken, etc. etc. – so among other things I wanted to see if it actually made one jot of difference to the film.

And of course it doesn’t. The Heineken bottle, for example, is only visible for about ten seconds – and even then you don’t get to see the brand name. Sure, you can recognise the label, but the actual brand isn’t there. Which I thought was interesting.

There’s actually a lot of product placement – but I don’t get the current kerfuffle about it, to be honest. Bond films have *always* been a bonanza of product placement. Why scream about the product placement of a bottle of beer, in comparison to – for example – Aston Martin’s deal? Oh no, sorry, that’s ‘classic’, so somehow it doesn’t count. Bond is a label queen, always has been, always will be.

Take a second, think of all the names/brands that you mentally link to Bond…

• Aston Martin
• Lotus
• Walther PPK
• Martini (I know it’s the name of the cocktail, but all the same)
• Bollinger champagne

And that’s just ten seconds thought.

To me it’s interesting, seeing the things that people *perceive* as product placement, versus what’s there as either ‘classic’ stuff, or simply not realised.

In Skyfall, sure, the Sony Vaio brand is all over the place, and not particularly subtle. But there’s all the old favourites too. Audi cars are used in most scenes, and there’s a couple of references to VW Beetles which I’m quite certain aren’t coincidental.

Personally, I find product placement to be less intrusive than normal advertising. Well, at least when it’s done properly – I can think of a few really bad examples of super-obvious tie-ins that were just painful (I, Robot’s obsession with Converse and Audi, for example, and the Cisco overdose on Transformers films) – but for the most part it’s something my brain can gloss over.

Indeed – and again, from a personal perspective – I found that the pre-film adverts, also 90% Bond-related were far more intrusive, and led me to the point of being pissed off with Bond before the film had even started.

Product-placement and tie-ins I can live with. Related advertising is far worse.