An admission: I like the Coen Brothers. Their work is offbeat enough to give you pause. Weird, yet surreal. It’s the only way to explain why they shot scenes in No Country for Old Men that highlight the hood ornament of an SUV more than 20 years old: the Dodge Ramcharger.
Would the Dodge marketing people want a murderous sociopath as a selling message?
Placing products and brand signals in movies is big. Apple has the laptop market covered in Hollywood. BMW is the car of movie Alpha males. VW built an ad campaign around the safety of its Touareg 2 for the most recent iteration of the Bourne thrillers with Matt Damon.
Product placement can help spread the word about your brand, whether making the decision or not. I remember during last season’s The Sopranos HBO series when Tony Soprano (a more lovable sociopath) gushed about TaylorMade golf clubs. In an instant, some 9 million viewers saw the global brand and heard the rave.
It was all by design.
Next time you watch a movie, see how many brands you can spot.
1 Comment
March 19, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Brand placement is insidious, therefore I don’t like it. But it works!