Marketing disguised in movies or movies dsguising marketing?

So, I already posted on how much marketing influences and uses the film industry as another promoting tool and brand awareness strategy and I left you with the question whether movie plots and production adjust to the needs of the marketing plan of the movie sponsors these days, rather than using movies to explore a certain subject, issue, portray characters and people or describe the way we used to be and the way we are.

Well let's start from the beginning of the whole story; in the early days of television various companies would act as an insurance back up for shows, and so for example ''soap opera's'' got the adjective from their washing powder sponsors; or ''Wings'', the first movie ever to win a best picture Oscar award back in 1927 contained a publicity for Hershey's.

The 1980's saw the explosion of the practice of product placement in blockbusters, such as showcasing futuristic cars in the hit trilogy ''Back to the future'' or featuring trainers from a famous shoe company in the indipendent movie ''She's gotta have it'' by Spike Lee.

By the end of the 80's a new, more subtle and harder to spot approach to advertising through movies was to be used, such as cultivating relationships with prop-masters who eventually use your product when accessorising a movie set, as in the Apple case which is mentioned in the interview that follows; just to give you a quick overview on how this kind of product placement works, I'm posting part of an interview done with a famous US prop master knick named Charlie Props (Charlie Guanci, Jr), working on legendary shows and movies such as'' Miami Vice'', ''Bad Boys'' and currently on air ''Burn notice'', as he explains the way this kind of product placement works:

Does product placement affect you at all and what you choose?

CG: It does, a great deal. In television it’s very difficult to get stuff right away, quickly, because there’s a whole protocol in getting people to respond back to you and how they work. I deal with product placement companies who will send me sunglasses for the actors to wear. There’s not brand recognition on that so we have to be careful the network how we use like a Heineken beer bottle. We gotta go clear that then they have to authorize us to use it and make sure the network doesn’t have any Budweiser advertisements conflicting with that. And that takes time, it could take a week, it could take a month. I know there’s been things that we haven’t still gotten clearance on and there’s stuff we would like to clearance on that you’d think they’d just say “no problem” and we can’t just stick it in there so we use generics.

As a prop guy, why is Apple in every single TV show out there?

CG: It’s funny that you say that because… About four years ago, when I was really trying to go after Apple for a show, they were just, “Well we’ve allocated all of our product out, we don’t have anything to give.” Then the last show that I finished doing, Apple was just throwing stuff. They were just, you know their media relations and advertising have markets they’re going for at certain times in the year and they just push it. Apple iPhones on the last show were just coming out like candy. But to get Apple on here it’s, uh, something we haven’t followed right away. The Apple phone is the technology that we’d like to have but it’s soon becoming passé.

Is Apple product placement easier to deal with than say Dell?

CG: It depends on the situation and the time of year. If it’s big season, in television, when there’s a lot of shows and a lot of features, they only have so much merchandise that they can let go out. They don’t have just warehouses full of stuff. If I call product placement, they may have ten or fifteen laptops or ten or fifteen handsets available that they have to put on all of these shows, so they are limited on their volume of equipment. But, they’d make a great product, I have an Apple computer. [laughter]

*You can read the whole interview by clicking here.

Another type of partnership common these days is the kind we find in Olivier Assayas's ''Summer hours'', a French movie promoting the famous Parisian D'Orsay museum; since the museum didn't have the money to invest in the movie, they came with an alternative idea by letting the crew use some of the pieces exposed in the museum as part of their set design and by letting the crew shoot in the museum at a reduced rate; the result was as efficient as if they invested in the movie, and that is great publicity and promotion throughout the world.

After this brief historical review on product placement and promotion through movies, what is certain is that there is no indication or warning of the heavy influence exercised by the movie sponsors and backers on the movie script, and therefore the new heavily disguised marketing methods used these days should make us be more aware of who is financing the movies as much as who's starring in it and shooting it.

Now I know for sure that the next time I will go to the cinema I will pay a lot more attention on both the beginning and ending movie credits.