Another idle thought inspired by the Bond movie (I may or may not post comments about the movie as a whole, but you can check out Kate's spoiler-laden comments. I liked it a little more than she did, but I'm more familiar with the genre, and willing to cut them more slack...):
From what I can tell, this movie appears to have gotten about 50% of its budget from product placement. Any time Bond uses his laptop, the shot is carefully set up to put the big "VAIO" logo right in the center of the screen. His magic cell phone gets almost as much screen time as the girl, and there's even a scene where he's driving a rental car, and they make sure to throw the Ford logo in your face. I'm surprised they didn't identify the manufacturer of the rope used in the torture scene.
I mentioned this on the way back, and Kate said, "Well, they can't all be Rex Stout."
Which made me wonder about the whole history of product placement. For those who haven't read them, in Rex Stout's umpteen books about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, nearly all the brands are fake. The car they drive, the gun Archie uses, the booze they drink, the papers they read-- everything is made up, as near as I can tell.
My question is, why is that? Is it just some weird ethical quirk on the part of Rex Stout, or was that a general practice way back in the day, and he just kept it up longer than anyone else? I don't recall there being nearly as much brand fudging in, say, Raymond Chandler.
Also, when did ostentatious product placement start to be a common practice in movies? There are jokes about it in spoof movies going back to the early 80's at least, so it was well established before that, but does anybody know who the first person to think up the idea was?
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The first time I remember being aware of seeing it in a movie was in the late 70's -- one of the Bond flicks, perhaps Moonraker. Somebody comes crashing through a big advertising display. I don't remember what the ad was for anymore, but I remember thinking that the product placement there was quite blatant. (And here I am less than 12 years old, if it's the 70's.) I had heard about it being done sometime before that.
Product placement is showing up in video games nowadays, too.
-Rob
From what I've always heard, product placement really took off after the scene with the Reese's Pieces in ET, and the suddenness with which people went from not eating them to eating (and therefore buying) them.
While watching that movie, I was thinking, "This really is rookie Bond--they've got him driving a Ford!" And also hoping, for his sake, that his VAIO laptop was of a higher quality than the hunk of junk I have (via work).
I know next to nothing about the history of product placement, but I do remember that The X-Files was notable in that the producer went out of his way to avoid showing real brands in the show.
Well, in print novels, there's historically been a problem with authors getting sued for "generic" use of brand names, on the basis of diluting the brand identification. I remember a riff in one story to the effect of ".. a laminated plastic table (yes, I know nobody calls it "laminated plastic", but if so-and-so got sued for the S-word, I'm not going to risk the F-word)..."). Movies typically have a corporate sponsor who can negotiate for these things beforehand.
Interestingly, the E.T. script originally had M&Ms, but M&M/Mars didn't want to be associated with that weird alien thing.... Whoops!
The VAIO is there, of course, because the movie is put out by Sony.
I've read that the Bond novels were full of posh brandnames as well.
Saw the film Friday night. Not bad.
VAIOs tend to be utter shite, from everything I've seen and experienced, but then Sony hardware's gone completely down the commode in the past decade. Sad, really...I've got a couple of late-80s early-90s Sony pieces that are still absolute workhorses.
I went to the film with two friends, one a fellow car geek and the other not. I think the one who wasn't into cars got at least as much amusement out of our reaction to the various cars in the film as he did from the movie. From the dismayed mutterings at Bond behind the wheel of a Focus, to the exstatic squeals (OK, I "ooohed," she squealed) at the appearance of the DB9-S, to the horrified exclamations at...well, if you've seen it, you can probably guess.
When I was young and read Hardy Boys books (probably written sometime mid-twentienth century), they were always following a car that was described as either a "sedan", a "coupe", or an "import", terms probably never used in real life. I don't even think I knew what the first two meant.
We saw the movie a couple of weeks ago, and I remember the laptop computer, but I didn't really notice the rest of the products. Except the Aston Martins. I must not be the target audience for product placements. Most of the time what I notice about product placement is when a character very obviously places his hand across the brand name on a soft drink can. I guess that's product nonplacement.
One thing I will never understand is how to figure out the difference between product placement and licensing.
Sometimes you pay to show somebody else's trademarks in your movies; that's licensing. Sometimes they pay you; that's product placement.
The whole thing just makes my head spin. I'd vote for freedom of speech and forget about the whole damn thing, but then people come yelling at me for being some sort of copyright-hating communist who wants musicians to starve or some such.
-Rob
Well, in print novels, there's historically been a problem with authors getting sued for "generic" use of brand names, on the basis of diluting the brand identification. I remember a riff in one story to the effect of ".. a laminated plastic table (yes, I know nobody calls it "laminated plastic", but if so-and-so got sued for the S-word, I'm not going to risk the F-word)..."). Movies typically have a corporate sponsor who can negotiate for these things beforehand.
I think that's a matter of trademark dilution, though, not product placement per se. I don't think anybody's sued, say, Brett Easton Ellis for dropping brand names left and right in his books, but you'll get in trouble if you use "xerox" as an uncapitalized verb meaning "to copy by xerographic reproduction." I also doubt he's paying licensing fees to use the brand names, either-- as long as you're talking about the actual objects, I think you're free to use the names as you like.
I have it on good authority that trademark law is Just Weird, though, so I'm not really sure.
I think mollishka is right, in that it was with E.T. that product placement first became big news. What I don't know is whether earlier things like the "Pan Am" spaceplane in 2001 were actual, paid-for product placements (so to speak), or (in that case) just an independent attempt at futuristic verisimilitude. The latter is what some of the cyberpunk writers, like William Gibson, were aiming for in their writing, by using a mix of invented and real company names for futuristic devices.
"Licensing" is for using copyrighted creative works. If you want to play part of a song (or even have an actor sing "Happy Birthday") in your movie, then you need a license from the copyright holder, otherwise you're violating their copyright. Ditto if you clearly show a clip from another movie or from a TV show -- those are copyrighted works.
But there's no such thing as a "copyright" for ordinary products like cars. You can, in principle, film your characters driving anything. What some people have figured out is that some car manufacturers, for example, might pay to have Cool Character X in Popular Movie Y prominently driving their car, in hopes that the coolness and popularity will rub off on their car. And so the movie producers auction off potential product placement items.
Bond drives a Focus in this movie?! I - boring, middle-aged, cat-owning single female - drive a Focus. Bond, James Bond, does not drive a flippin' Focus.
Bond drives a Focus in this movie?! I - boring, middle-aged, cat-owning single female - drive a Focus. Bond, James Bond, does not drive a flippin' Focus.
It's a Mondeo, not a Focus, apparently. (I don't really know if that makes a difference; probably not.) And he does spend more time driving Aston Martins.
As the Wikipedia article on James Bond vehicles tells us, Bond can be seen driving an old Ford convertible when he visits Cuba in Die Another Day. A classier car, admittedly. (Yes, of course there's a Wikipedia article devoted entirely to vehicles in James Bond movies.)
I haven't seen the movie, was just reacting to Skwid's post. But the Mondeo is still a "family car." And the name is so easily parodied as the Mundane.
Oddly, this post made me wonder if all the books Wolfe reads are real books or not.
MKK
All the books mentioned in the Nero Wolfe stories were real. Stout was famously supportive of writers and was glad to promote a good book (or, in the case of Webster's Third, trash it).