Product placement

[tahnan]

Product placement has gotten out of hand. I'm watching Willy Wonka on TNT, which doesn't have any that I've noticed (well, there's lots of Willy Wonka chocolate). It's currently on commercial break, and I just watched a commercial for Swiffer Dusters.

When showing that it could clean up makeup spills, the setting moved to, apparently, a teenage girl's room, with a poster of "Maid in Manhattan" in the background. I wrote it off as set dressing, except that later in the commercial the top of a TV set was being dusted, a DVD case for the movie was prominently propped up on top of the set.

Product placement in ads? Sigh,

Comments

[lemurtanis.livejournal.com]

Yes!! This has been scaring me recently as well. There's a Sprint ad running that prominently features the Pillsbury Doughboy.

Naomi Klein probably saw this coming, but I sure didn't.

[mildmannered.livejournal.com]

While I haven't noticed *brand-name* product placement before, I have been aware for some time that ads are generally not selling products so much as systems of products; cell phones so that you can talk while you drive in your SUV, digital cameras so you can send pictures over your laptop. Lifestyle advertising.

What weirds me out are the current slew of Old Navy ads. My best guess is they shot a bunch of commercials but didn't like any of them, so they cobbled them together. How else do you explain an ad campaign incorporating Lil Kim, Fran Drescher and a monkey?

[navrins]

Well, they're ads already. It doesn't annoy me more that they're advertising two things than when they only advertise one.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

But it's not joint advertising, it's just...placement. Product placement. It's weird!

[bumblepudding.livejournal.com]

What you didn't notice is that in the poster for _Maid in Manhattan_ before which the Swiffer Dusters are being used, there is a very small, battered copy of _Charlie and the Chocolate Factory_. Which is, in turn, very much in need of dusting.

The likely culprit

[(Anonymous)]

This is probably a two-way product placement. Nobody I know is willing to watch Maid in Manhattan to check, but Swiffer was probably placed in the movie first. So the ad subtly refers you to the movie, which will cause you to see yet another casual Swiffer ad, which will almost distract you from J-Lo's ass.

Ugarte
http://www.rickblaine.com