“She opened the fridge and pulled out a Diet Pepsi” or “store brand Coke” are both things people might actually think about pulling out of the fridge.

Well, I can’t think of a film in which a character would reach into the fridge and pull out a can of celery soda.

On the one hand, we want to read about and watch the luxury products of the rich and famous…

Speak for yourself.

As for Bond, others are right to note the product placement in the books: he drove an Bentley 4.5l with the Amherst Villiers supercharger. There’s also a hat-tip to the Goldfinger Aston at the start of the new Casino Royale with the powder-blue DB5. So while the Sony placement was painful, the Aston was less so.

I wonder about the product placement in those movies that mock product placement: The Truman Show, Wayne’s World.

Mike Myers may have mocked it, but he’s raked in tons from it: the last Austin Powers film was painfully saturated in placement.

Ford sells well designed, high quality vehicles in Europe, while selling outdated and outclassed cars in its home market.

GM also. Though even Honda outfits its line differently in its major markets: the Japanese Civic is funkier than the European than the American. Americans won’t buy funky cars unless they’re sold (Mini, PT Cruiser) as ‘funky cars’. My guess is that the new Mondeo/Taurus in the US won’t look like that at all.

As for its appropriateness as a product placement, the car Bond is driving at the beginning of the movie is meant to be a rental. It’s really one of the least egregious placements in the movie.

Imagine you’re in a government IT department. You have a choice between being creative and being just like everyone else. If you’re creative, there’s a good chance the department will benefit, and a small chance the department will suffer. If you go with the flow, the department gets by like everyone else.

Now, here’s the kicker – if the department benefits, you don’t get shit out of it. If it suffers, you’re going get eased out of your job or at least stall on the career path.

Which do you choose?

Presumeably, this would not be a problem if she were using an in-house or even an out-of-house, but ultra-exclusive, coffee maker. So I guess that you could say that this serves the plot, rather than being placement.

Of course, it could have been a made up local cofee house, rather than a Starbucks per se. Since the novel is based on the author’s actual experiences as the assistant to the editor of Vogue, I wonder if this is a real or made up detail.

Anyway, the Bond books were, as far as I remember, among the first to use product placement – unpaid – in order to add authenticity. Philip Marlowe smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey. You don’t learn any more than that.
Bond smokes Senior Service with the three gold bands, and drinks… well, a vast amount, but it’s all brand-names. Even his marmalade is branded (Coopers Oxford). About the only things that are brand-named in Chandler and earlier thrillers like Buchan are the weapons, and not even them all the time; but in Bond it’s everything. It’s the start of a process which led inexorably to Tom Clancy and his Lockheed Martin catalogues disguised as thrillers. I don’t think LockMart pay him for favourable references to the F-22A Raptor, but I could be wrong…

Bond in a Ford Focus was quite funny; rubbed in his status as a very junior officer. He’d probably only just moved up from the Mondeo.

So he and De Beers set up the Central Selling Organisation to market South African rocks, whose real purpose was to act as a cartel and prevent too many diamonds from reaching the market, thus maintaining their scarcity and hence, price.