I watched The Devil Wears Prada not long ago – as the name implies, it’s not short on product placement, though of course this is part of the fun. The central character, played by Meryl Streep, is the editor of a fashion magazine and the heroine/narrator is hired her assistant. Streep’s character is represented as an impossibly demanding princess – the first illustration of this being an imperious demand for Starbucks coffee, delivered in a paper (or maybe even styrofoam) cup. Even allowing for the needs of product placement, and the curiously high status of this coffee-shop chain in the US, this strikes me as way off the mark. Surely she should be demanding her own personal barista, freshly grinding exotic coffee beans, and delivering the product in brand-name china (compare the gangster-movie financier in Mulholland Drive who spits out the coffee with which his hosts have struggled desperately to please him).
But all this comes to the central contradiction of promoting luxury consumption, which Henry discussed not long ago. On the one hand, we want to read about and watch the luxury products of the rich and famous, and advertisers want to exploit this. On the other hand, if we could all afford to buy it, it wouldn’t be luxury consumption. There are ways around this – for example, Gucci makes its name with impossibly expensive clothes, but makes much of its profits by attaching its brand name, and the associated high markups, to lower-priced products like sunglasses.
Of course, I’m using “luxury” in a special sense here. Refrigerators were once available only to the wealthy, but they are valuable because they are useful. Now they are cheap and widely available (note that other items, like university education are going in the opposite direction), but this isn’t a problem. By contrast, the kind of luxury I’m talking about, represented most clearly by high fashion relies on exclusiveness for its value. In the end, this is a zero-sum game, which probably explains some of the oddities of fashion.
{ 28 comments }
Delicious Pundit 01.23.07 at 7:46 pm
Surely she should be demanding her own personal barista, freshly grinding exotic coffee beans, and delivering the product in brand-name china.
So you’d think, and yet I’ve never heard of it (in Hollywood anyway). But then magazine editors, or showrunners, are still only high-level managers who serve at someone else’s pleasure, and they work for publicly traded companies that can’t afford to be seen staffing private baristas. My understanding of NYC is that the corporate dining room isn’t what it used to be, either.
(Note that showrunners do often own a small percentage of their shows, but generally don’t control their budgets.)
vivian 01.23.07 at 8:35 pm
How abut: mass-marketing luxury consumption is an attempt to convert it into a positional good. But if you have the luxury of a personal assistant, a better positional good, you don’t need to be pretentions about drinking exclusively prepared coffee – just have the PA get you what you enjoy, and move on to the next item, like collecting laundry, or whatever. (But I haven’t seen the movie, so may be completely off base.)
Molly 01.23.07 at 8:48 pm
The Starbucks bit wasn’t specific to the movie, but was also in the book. While product placement in novels isn’t completely unheard of (e.g., that whole Faye Weldon/Bulgari incident), I’m not under the impression that it’s yet widespread in that genre. So, this may not necessarily be an example of imposed product placement.
That said, your larger point is still an apt one, I think.
Stacy 01.23.07 at 11:12 pm
I assume the only reason product placement isn’t as common in novels as movies is because a lot fewer people will read any given novel than will see any given movie. Nobody even knows how many people read a novel. Bestseller lists only tell you how many buy them. How many copies of The Da Vinci Code are sitting on bookcases, with a bookmark stuck in Chapter 2?
Further (ok, I said one reason, humor me), I think product placement happens in novels and we just don’t notice it. “She opened the fridge and pulled out a cola” sounds artificial. “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.
Matt Weiner 01.23.07 at 11:32 pm
Another possible reason is that when a movie character pulls a drink out of the fridge it’s got to be a specific drink. If you were narrating my dinner you might well say “He got a beer from the fridge and twisted the cap off”; if you were filming me you’d have to film very carefully to show that it wasn’t a Shiner (or other brand). So the moviemakers might think, as long as you need to use a specific brand why not get paid for it?
Bill Gardner 01.24.07 at 12:46 am
“the central contradiction of promoting luxury consumption… On the one hand, we want to read about and watch the luxury products of the rich and famous, and advertisers want to exploit this. On the other hand, if we could all afford to buy it, it wouldn’t be luxury consumption.”
I’m guessing that the retailers view products as having life cycles. You begin with boutique production, small volume, and extraordinary markups. Having acquired luxury glamour, now take the product down market. Briefly capture a smaller but substantial premium on a much larger volume. And so on. It’s a different product marketed in a different way at each step.
Danbye 01.24.07 at 2:10 am
Perhaps someone’s already blogged on this subject, but by far the most egregious product placement I’ve seen in the cinema is in the recent Bond movie. Every electronic item is Sony (I mean, come on– surely MI6 would be on Mac?) and the following exchange made me choke on my toffees:
GIRL: Is that a Rolex?
BOND: Omega.
GIRL: Nice.
No. Not nice. Not nice at all.
bad Jim 01.24.07 at 4:46 am
I just bought myself an LED desk lamp from Sharper Image, which, contrary to expectation, is labeled “Koncept”. So far it’s been bad enough.
Seven watts max. Does your lamp suck less?
abb1 01.24.07 at 6:21 am
They don’t promote any “luxury consumption”; they promote their brand and nothing else.
Peter 01.24.07 at 10:04 am
compare the gangster-movie financier in Mulholland Drive who spits out the coffee with which his hosts have struggled desperately to please him
Another example of a movie blooper. The amount of coffee which the mobster spits out is far more than he could have taken into his mouth while sipping the espresso, in fact it’s probably more than the tiny cup could’ve held.
Peter 01.24.07 at 10:16 am
An example of a movie blooper caused by product placement occurred in the Jack Nicholson movie About Schmidt. The title character’s daughter and son-in-law fly to Omaha from Denver following his wife’s sudden death. There’s a lengthy look at the Midwest Express airline logo during the scene at the Omaha airport, almost certainly a product-placement deal rather than an incidental background shot.
Flying Midwest Express from Denver to Omaha would require going by way of Milwaukee, a lengthy and mostly likely expensive routing that offers little if any time savings over driving. United and Frontier are far better known in Denver and offer direct flights to Omaha.
Jasper Milvain 01.24.07 at 10:30 am
Casino Royale‘s product placement gets even more deforming, if not as explicit, with the cars: Bond is obliged to be seen in a prominently badged hired Ford Focus before being issued with his Aston Martin (also, of course, a Ford-owned brand). The motoring journalist I used to sit next to got a lot of press releases about that film.
Alex 01.24.07 at 10:43 am
I mean, come on- surely MI6 would be on Mac?
I have never seen, nor heard of, a UK Government Macintosh. Nuh, the civil service loves it some Wintel. (In fact, going by the bureaucrats and actual MI6 officers on my commute, the government has a deal with Fujitsu-Siemens for laptops.)
Alex 01.24.07 at 10:48 am
More topically, Quiggin is talking about the phenomenon that made Cecil Rhodes rich. With the discovery of the Kimberley diamond mines, and then the introduction of mechanisation and dynamite, he realised that although he could now sell vastly more diamonds than anyone had ever before, that wasn’t actually a good thing. Who would want diamonds if everybody could afford them?
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.
ajay 01.24.07 at 10:54 am
That’s because Fujitsu-Siemens are cheap… (I use one).
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.
Tim McG 01.24.07 at 12:26 pm
The Mac laptops with which you can hack into the aliens’ computer system in Independence Day are another hilarious product placement.
Danbye 01.24.07 at 12:35 pm
I wonder about the product placement in those movies that mock product placement: The Truman Show, Wayne’s World. Do they get paid by the brands they place? Those brands get exposure more prominent even than that in your regular movie.
Michael B Sullivan 01.24.07 at 1:14 pm
As Molly in comment 3 points out, the Starbucks runs are extensively commented upon in the book. In the book, the heroine has considerable trouble getting the coffee on time, and eventually finds that she needs to assert herself as a VIP and get the management to let her cut in line in order to meet Priestly’s demands (which is portrayed as sort of philosphically troubling for the heroine, in line with her continuing and overall problems with the attitudes of her co-workers).
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.
smokey 01.24.07 at 1:52 pm
In response to danbye, I would also like to know how parodistic placement works. In Talledega Nights there was a great deal of mocking of the absurd levels Nascar goes in product placement, but at the same time, they were real products (including Perrier for the “French” driver).
American Citizen 01.24.07 at 4:15 pm
As far as most people know, paid product placement in novels is very rare (Bulgari being the exception). Of course, brands are often mentioned in novels, but it’s unpaid. Many times, it’s a natural way to show something about a character. “He gets a beer out of the fridge” is generic, versus “He gets a [cheap beer] out of his [cheap brand]” or “He gets a [expensive beer] out of his [expensive brand]”.
Phoenician in a time of Romans 01.24.07 at 7:50 pm
I have never seen, nor heard of, a UK Government Macintosh. Nuh, the civil service loves it some Wintel.
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?
Alistair 01.24.07 at 8:51 pm
Actually, the car Bond drives in the beginning of Casino Royale is the upcoming Ford Mondeo, not a Focus. It’s quite a sexy vehicle for a mass market family car. The irony is that it’s more exotic to an American audience than the Aston, because at least the Aston can actually be bought here (and where I live, I see several a day). Ford sells well designed, high quality vehicles in Europe, while selling outdated and outclassed cars in its home market. It’s rather perplexing, especially since they’re profitable overseas and hemorrhage cash in the US.
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.
nick s 01.25.07 at 12:27 am
vivian is right: Streep’s character demonstrates distinction not through her choice of coffee, but her having a pissboy/pissgirl to fetch it.
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.
ajay 01.25.07 at 5:01 am
Bob Howard, of course, drives a Smart car…
Ginger Yellow 01.25.07 at 8:27 am
Speak for yourself.
I.G.I. 01.25.07 at 1:19 pm
Another angle: I would venture the bet that overtly vulgar product placement in films, as in Bond saga, is driven by brands experiencing difficulties – it could be products development, or brand identity, or the management’s lack of vision, etc. In my view it’s a desperate form of advertising. Aston Martin is a text book example: as the marque declined during the 1970s and the 80s it increasingly started to rely on the dubious Prince of Walles connections, association with the Bond kitch, hand made feel and blah blah. The simple truth was that AM could not compete with the Italian and the German manufacturers in the upper sector of the market.
On the other hand intelligent discrete product placement may do wonders. Richard Gere in American Gigolo is dressed entirely in Armani yet the name appears only at the end of the titles. As far as I know the film did wonders for the Armani sales in ther US.
sara 01.25.07 at 10:26 pm
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.
Anarch 01.26.07 at 1:53 pm
American Psycho (at least the book) is saturated with product placement, though I doubt anyone paid for that. Ironic product placement was taken to extremes in two movies that I know of: Fight Club, where every product placement (deliberately) occurs in a scene of horrific violence or transgression; and Revenge Of The Killer Tomatoes, where, due to metafictional budget crises as the film progresses, the main actors start actively breaking the fourth wall — and in some cases, the actual set — to hawk their wares.
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