Product Placement in Movies

As you can see from my previous posts, I don't like to repeat the definitions and the theory but rather prefer to give good and easy to understand examples.  I will do the same with this post; after a small theory paragraph for everyone who doesn't know about product placement.

Product Placement is a marketing strategy used by companies to promote a product, usually through appearances of the product in films, television interviews or any other media.  The companies usually pay a fee, but sometimes they have other agreements, for example, providing the movie recording crew with beverages for exchange; for there soft drink to be appear in the movie.  Other examples are:

• A car manufacturer to pay to have the movie characters to drive their cars;
• On interviews, drinking a specific water brand;
• On movies, the main characters using a specific brand of mobile and etc.

So here are the two movies I watched to find out what brands appear in the movie..:

The movies are randomly chosen. 

First movie is Harold and Kumar go to white castle.
The whole movie is about two guys trying to go to "white castle" fast food.  So here it is the first advertisement already.  While they are at home, the one guy says "I am hungry lets go to KFC" and while they have a conversation there is an advertisement(white castle) on the TV.  The KFC brand appears in the movie a couple of times again while some other brands are promoted too: pepsi, doridos, and kodak. (the last three are in a market where you couldn't recognize any other brands, only these three brands.  The aim of the marketers is to lure the movie watchers to go to one of there branches while the aim of the movie producers is to reduce the expenses with some sponsors.

American Pie Reunion
In the whole movie you could see products that didn't have any written brand on it, for example cars and laptops, which shows that they don't want to advertise products for free.  On the other hand, on some points of the movie you could see some brands, like Pringles krisps on the kitchen table, or iMac.  One of the actors even said that he works for staples as an assistant manager while he could say he works for a "marketing company, a theater, a convenient shop etc." .

So product placement is a marketing communication tool which tries to advertise indirectly through a movie.

And then its the documentary movie "the greatest movie ever sold" which I recommend that explains all the above.  All the expenses were covered by the sponsors, the different brands that appeared and with a total cost of zero .(income from sponsors-expenses =>0 )