Product Placement in Hollywood Films: A History (review)

Twilight Zone

As with so many things in modern Hollywood films, the trend began with Steven Spielberg. In 1982, when the director was preparing E.T., he approached Mars, the makers of M & Ms, with the idea of a cross-promotional deal linked to a scene in which the child hero and the gooey extra-terrestrial form a friendship over a handful of sweets. Mars declined the offer, so Spielberg turned instead to Hershey, the makers of Reese's Pieces. This time, the answer was yes, one million dollars in promotion money was forthcoming, and within a month of the film's release, sales of the sweet were said to have rocketed by eighty per cent.

Twenty years on, this money-spinning practice has spread like the plague (or flourished like the green bay tree, depending on the point of view). For example, according to Variety, Spielberg's own Minority Report (2002) took twenty-five million dollars from fifteen major companies, including American Express, Gap and Pepsi, in exchange for having their products featured in the film. Welcome to the world of product placement, that twilight zone in which it is hard to distinguish between the film that you have paid to see and the advertisement or promotional gimmick that you might have wanted to avoid, if anyone had given you a choice.

The underlying implication of Kerry Segrave's study of Hollywood and its sometimes paradoxical relationship with advertising is that choice is the last thing on the studios' or product pushers' minds. On the contrary, they want you to sit there in the cinema, nicely captive in the dark, and saturate your consciousness with the logos and the brand names of corporate America. The author is no critic; the book is, on the whole, a rather wearying list of facts and figures culled in the main from trade journals. Nevertheless, the message is clear. If you feel that most Hollywood mainstream films are sentimental packages of delusion and sentimentality, then you should not be surprised. Advertisements are like that, and the majority of American films, at least since the late Seventies, are just covert advertisements anyway.

E.T. may have ushered in the current stage of this depressing process, but, as Segrave shows, the practice existed in a less institutionalised form almost as soon as the film industry had become a rationalised studio system (or "cartel", as he baldly calls it) during the 1920s. Back in those innocent days, a manufacturer might offer a prop (and a backhander) to a property master, or get a star to endorse a product in a magazine advertisement in exchange for a personal fee. Yet this was very much nickels and dimes stuff. The reason why it became a multi-million dollar industry is because, ironically, the great continent of salesmanship has been consistently reluctant to have overt examples of that salesmanship displayed on its cinema screens.

The book devotes most of its space to this byzantine issue, which first surfaced during the Depression when the studios and their exhibition arms were desperate to find new sources of revenue as the economic crisis bit into ticket sales. Early techniques were adopted from radio. A company sponsored a ten-minute "ad short", as Segrave calls them, which tended to be about a product, an industrial process, or a soft sell of the glories of the American Way. There were problems, however. For one thing, there was concern that, having paid for a ticket, especially in the pricier first run houses, audiences would resent being exposed to anything that seemed like a commercial, even though the prevailing wisdom was to emphasis the "entertainment" rather than the pitch. For another thing, there is evidence to suggest that newspapers, fearful for their own advertising revenue, threatened in the 1930s to retaliate by withdrawing their own Hollywood coverage...