By Daniel Rigney
The Academy Awards should add a new Oscar category: an award for best product placement, or alternatively, a citation for worst product pollution, in the movies.
The award would recognize exemplars of "embedded marketing" in the cinematic arts. It would spotlight movies that drop one commercial brand name after another into their scripts, weaving stories and commercials together into a single narrative that profits both studio and advertiser.
That's advertainment!
Most movie consumers seem perfectly willing to pay to watch embedded commercials. Some of us, though, are growing annoyed and losing patience to the point of distraction with constant onscreen product pollution.
Morgan Spurlock has done more than complain. He's made a movie about it, chock full of self-exemplifying product placements.
Spurlock would never win an Oscar in the product placement category. He's way too transparent about how embedded marketing actually works. Would the sausage industry give an award to Upton Sinclair for his muckraking expose of meatpacking?
Spurlock's "making of a movie" documentary, “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” (2011), is actually a jokey and self-aware mockumentary -- both a "pleasingly circular” satire of embedded marketing and a harsh indictment of the consumerism it feeds and feeds upon. His film is funded entirely by the fruit drink Pom and several other corporate sponsors whose financial support Spurlock has enterprisingly pursued, and whose products appear shamelessly and amusingly throughout the film.
Even Ralph Nader® does a self-kidding cameo, tweaking his own brand as a humorless no-nonsense crusader.
Spurlock's film manages to blur every blurable line: between art and commerce, between reality and reality show, between comedy and documentary, and between prostitute and client. The movie bends back upon itself in an endless loop of self-parody and social parody.
Spurlock leaves us with this question: "Am I selling out or buying in?" In the end he acknowledges that he himself has become a "brand." I wonder if, in this market society, we all are.
To qualify for Oscar consideration in the product placement category, a movie should practice embedded marketing with much less intelligence and humor than Spurlock does.
If I were on the nominating committee for this Oscar, I might put up “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” (2009), starring the well-rounded comic actor Kevin James as a hapless security guard in an American shopping mall. It was sheer commercial genius to set this orgy of product placement in a shopping mall. (Did the ad agency Olson and Draper come up with this?) What can possibly top a mall as a target-rich environment for embedded marketing opportunities?
Many of “Mall Cop’s” scenes are interior shots in or in front of various national and global chain retailers, their signs and wares displayed prominently. The mall as movie set is quite literally wall-to-wall advertising, just like a real mall.
And increasingly, just like most of American culture.
P.S.: As I write this, we've just seen "Easy A," an updating of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter set in 21st century Southern California. The script has Hester Prynne's character inundated with gifts and gift cards from perhaps a dozen different name-brand corporate vendors, from Office Max to Home Depot. This otherwise entertaining rom-com could well have been titled "Easy Ad."
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
The Academy Awards should add a new Oscar category: an award for best product placement, or alternatively, a citation for worst product pollution, in the movies.
The award would recognize exemplars of "embedded marketing" in the cinematic arts. It would spotlight movies that drop one commercial brand name after another into their scripts, weaving stories and commercials together into a single narrative that profits both studio and advertiser.
That's advertainment!
Most movie consumers seem perfectly willing to pay to watch embedded commercials. Some of us, though, are growing annoyed and losing patience to the point of distraction with constant onscreen product pollution.
Morgan Spurlock has done more than complain. He's made a movie about it, chock full of self-exemplifying product placements.
Spurlock would never win an Oscar in the product placement category. He's way too transparent about how embedded marketing actually works. Would the sausage industry give an award to Upton Sinclair for his muckraking expose of meatpacking?
Spurlock's "making of a movie" documentary, “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” (2011), is actually a jokey and self-aware mockumentary -- both a "pleasingly circular” satire of embedded marketing and a harsh indictment of the consumerism it feeds and feeds upon. His film is funded entirely by the fruit drink Pom and several other corporate sponsors whose financial support Spurlock has enterprisingly pursued, and whose products appear shamelessly and amusingly throughout the film.
Even Ralph Nader® does a self-kidding cameo, tweaking his own brand as a humorless no-nonsense crusader.
Spurlock's film manages to blur every blurable line: between art and commerce, between reality and reality show, between comedy and documentary, and between prostitute and client. The movie bends back upon itself in an endless loop of self-parody and social parody.
Spurlock leaves us with this question: "Am I selling out or buying in?" In the end he acknowledges that he himself has become a "brand." I wonder if, in this market society, we all are.
To qualify for Oscar consideration in the product placement category, a movie should practice embedded marketing with much less intelligence and humor than Spurlock does.
If I were on the nominating committee for this Oscar, I might put up “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” (2009), starring the well-rounded comic actor Kevin James as a hapless security guard in an American shopping mall. It was sheer commercial genius to set this orgy of product placement in a shopping mall. (Did the ad agency Olson and Draper come up with this?) What can possibly top a mall as a target-rich environment for embedded marketing opportunities?
Many of “Mall Cop’s” scenes are interior shots in or in front of various national and global chain retailers, their signs and wares displayed prominently. The mall as movie set is quite literally wall-to-wall advertising, just like a real mall.
And increasingly, just like most of American culture.
P.S.: As I write this, we've just seen "Easy A," an updating of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter set in 21st century Southern California. The script has Hester Prynne's character inundated with gifts and gift cards from perhaps a dozen different name-brand corporate vendors, from Office Max to Home Depot. This otherwise entertaining rom-com could well have been titled "Easy Ad."
http://open.salon.com/blog/danagram
No comments:
Post a Comment