Crain: Product Placement to Cause Another Chaos Scenario
Writing an opinion piece in Ad Age, Rance Crain says product placement may create a Bob Garfield-like chaos theory of its own. He claims that movie viewership and DVD sales may be down because people are sick of watching the increasing number of product placements within movies and games. He opines people are returning to traditional television viewership and that the infrastructure put in place to handle product placement and new media ad delivery may collapse upon itself as well as hurt advertiser's sales because the sell in a product placement is too soft.
Comments
I am not surprised by this at all. Fantastic Four for e.g. had ridiculous product placement for PEPSI throughout the movie and then the NIKE size 34 at the end was just so contrived. the problem is that people placing the products are not creative enough. they do not come up with witty solutions and ideas to make these things work. If anyone needs help figuring out how to creatively place products by all means give ANIMAL a call, at least we won't bullshit ya.
roar
How about this,
Gas is almost 3 bucks a gallon here in LA. Movie prices are over 10 bucks a person. Popcorn, small is over 5 bucks a bag. So it costs a family of 4 around 75 bucks to go to a movie, it cost a teen couple out on a date around 30 bucks to see a moive and they get there after they just paid an extra 10 bucks to fill up thier rides over last years gas prices... and to see what? A 'do over' of Bewitched, Herbie, Dukes, The Honey Mooners. So it astounds me that these studio execs, and entertainment industry execs can't figure it out. They sit around trying to anylize it. They need to get out more. Last year, there were almost as many DVD players, game systems and people with cable and broadband, as this year, so what has changed so much in a year. Gas is way up, buying a house is way up, movie prices are up, and... the movies just suck.
How bout that!
Bravo, Skip!
Good God. If that's a "creative placement" for your online art magazine, then bucky@animalNOSATISFACTIONOFALINK.com goes in my block list. Sheesh. Count me as "hmph" to that as much as "hmph, to proper-punctuation-when-shilling-your-boutique".
Eric - the blockhead - annoymous,
That was called a comment. And oh how will I ever go on with me being on your block list. Oh heavens, laf.
1. seem to recall a friend telling me about an episode on "30 something" that took the concept of product placement and pushed it WAY over the top. can anyone confirm this?
2. yeah, i agree with bucky there were some clumsy prodplac's in F4. but i grinned at the human torch slamming into a burger king "flame broiled" billboard. it was fairly subtle and IMHO a visual pun as opposed to a placement.
Skip sure is right, the problem is not a matter of massive piracy, less people go to movies,because its too expensive, imagine being a couple with two kids, who wants to drink and eat popcorn, while watching a crappy movie.
There's a difference between a "product placement" and a "pop-culture riff". If three people go to a bar, order beers, and the camera lingers on the bottles' labels as they are served...that's a product placement. If the hero grabs an empty bottle, says "This Bud's For You!", and beats a thug senseless...that's a riff.