South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
How brands became big stars onscreen
Rise of streaming has led to an explosion in product placement
Refrigerators aren’t movie stars, but they can pose a particular problem when they have a cameo onscreen. When Larry David casually opens the door in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” those shelves need to be full of food and drink, and each one of those items is likely to have a brand. Maybe there will even be a box of Cheerios on top of it, as in a recent episode of “Euphoria.” The fridge itself will have a brand, too, of course. All of this must usually be negotiated through carefully considered placements that give these products their 15 seconds (or less) of fame.
Product placement has long been a feature of Hollywood. Seeking a boost in brand recognition and association with cool characters, makers of beverages and cars, especially, have for decades paid or engaged in a quid pro quo to get their products into films. The first documented example was in 1896, when the Lumière brothers, often credited as the earliest filmmakers, agreed to feature soap in their film “Washing Day in Switzerland.”
But the rise of streaming has led to an explosion in product placement. Brands are looking for new ways to get eyeballs on their products, and productions are looking for creative ways to offset costs. Product placement is now a $23 billion industry, up by an estimated 14% since 2020.
“People aren’t paying attention to ads,” said Mike Proulx of the research consultancy Forrester. In a recent survey conducted by the group, only 5% of adults online in the United States said they rarely skipped ads; 74% said they often did. “It’s the holy grail for a brand to be integrated into the actual content itself.”
But product placement, often maligned for its obviousness, has to walk a thin line between showing off the product and fading seamlessly into the background. “It has to be executed in a way that doesn’t feel like an advertisement,” Proulx said.
Will all of this placement have an impact when viewers hit the grocery store aisle?
Agencies like Hollywood Branded connect the brands they represent with scriptwriters, producers, set decorators and prop masters, who might in turn work them into storylines.
“Products are part of our lives; they just are,” said Stacy Jones, Hollywood Branded’s chief executive. “Say you have a Montblanc pen; you automatically think, that character has a pen worth hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.”
Quid pro quo
The majority of product placement in film and television, Jones said, happens on a quid pro quo basis rather than in exchange for payment. A car company might lend an expensive car to a set in exchange for an appearance in the show, or S’well water might mail a case of bottles to propmasters for consideration.
There are paid placements, too, but particularly with large streaming companies like Netflix and HBO, it’s more frequently a matter of finagling loanand-trade agreements to reduce production budgets.
Ruby Moshlak, a self-identified prop mistress on the sets of television shows and films, is often working on a tight budget to create a realistic fictional world.
She described a delicate dance of finding the right object for the right character, like which car
Queen Latifah should drive on “The Equalizer.” “The Jaguar crossover SUV really suited the character well,” Moshlak said. “It’s kind of a mom car but still pretty cool, with retail value under $50,000, which is of upper-middle class but not anything so different than the sedan.” Moshlak was able to get it free, in exchange for the exposure.
Which is not to say that product placement always goes smoothly. Blatant product placement can both hurt a plotline and strain credibility.
“If James Bond were shown drinking only milk, or getting in a Ford Fiesta and not an Aston Martin, viewers would feel that crossed some kind of line,”
said June Deery, a professor of media studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who has studied the commercialization of American media. Also, the constraints associated with specific contracts can be creatively limiting.
The success of product placement as a marketing strategy relies on the interplay between the suspended reality onscreen and the free market economy of the offscreen world. It became obvious just how powerful this exchange can be when a character on “And Just Like That” had a heart attack while riding a Peloton — causing the reallife brand’s stock to plunge.
On the flip side, the
breakfast brand Eggo was reinvigorated when it was featured on the series “Stranger Things” as a key plot point. (After some years of lagging sales, there was reportedly a 14% spike after the show’s first season aired.)
More than a prop
While traditional product placement was oriented mostly around objects, less tangible brands are also seeking placements. The real estate search site Zillow, for instance, approached Branded Entertainment Network roughly six years ago about making its way into scripts.
“Zillow is really looking to capitalize on life change — marriage, moving, a new job, things like that,” said Erin Schmidt, chief product placement officer at Branded Entertainment Network, another agency that helps to coordinate product placement. “So we just go to the creator community and bring that essence to them, and then they’ll come to us and say: ‘I have this great opportunity in which a character is moving to Chicago for a new job. Maybe we can bring Zillow in there.’ ”
The site ended up in “Grace and Frankie,” “Never Have I Ever,” “Sweet Magnolias” and “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” among others — and the agency experimented with different strategies for working it in.
Tech companies are experimenting with tools to place products into shows that have already been taped and AI solutions that could, for example, swap one brand of alcohol for another — essentially selling placements like ad space for different markets.
At an industry conference in May, Amazon announced that it would be experimenting with a beta version of “virtual product placement,” which the company is testing in shows like “Reacher,” “Jack Ryan,” and the “Bosch” franchise.
“It creates the ability to film your series without thinking about all that is required with traditional placements during production,” Henrik Bastin, chief executive of Fabel Entertainment and executive producer of “Bosch: Legacy,” said at the conference. “Instead, you can sit with the final cut and see where a product could be seamlessly and naturally integrated into the storytelling.”