Scenes for sale: Product placement in films
Product placement has existed in films since the baby boomers were whizzing around with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck on Piaggio’s Vespa scooter in the much loved 1953 film Roman Holiday. Generation X, in the same way, looked at a young boy Elliot as he left behind crumbs of Hershey’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to befriend an alien in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. For the millennials, however, the backgrounds and the foregrounds of the film frames are all stamped with product logos, like the oversized branded popcorn tubs and cold drinks that they get before entering the cinemas. Having a samosa from a vendor weaving through the aisles of the Nishat Cinema seems to exist only as romanticised nostalgia. I wonder why ticket stubs are not branded yet.
The history of product placements goes as far back as the origin of cinema, though its initial manifestations were more like an artistic necessity than a commercial and financial one. Jay Newell, Charles T Salmon and Susan Chang in their 2006 paper, The Hidden History of Product Placement, published in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, argue that it began with family connections between film producers or film studios and product manufacturers. The products were gifted or loaned for set designs and/or story props. As a result, products were used in the films without any money involved. They were first employed as a business proposition after movie ticket sales had gone down during the Great Depression of 1929. Initially, the idea was to use branded products free of cost in order to cut expenses on building, buying or renting different goods required in a film.
Catering to advertisers rather than audiences is a pitfall that Pakistani films should at best avoid.
By the mid-1950s, companies were emerging which worked exclusively around the idea of showing branded products in the films. They formed relationships with Hollywood producers and prop managers, and would gain access to scripts before shooting began, looking for opportunities for their clients’ products and making suggestions to the studios, says Canadian broadcaster Terry O’Reilly in an August 2015 article. In 1962, Sean Connery’s James Bond drank Red Stripe lager and Smirnoff Vodka rather than a martini in Dr. No and flew Pan Am. Many years later, the manufacturers of Heineken reportedly paid 45 million US dollars – almost a third of the total movie budget – to have Bond drink a bottle of beer in Skyfall, O’Reilly points out.
The term “product placement” started coming up in the 1980s when an increased scholarly interest in the use of commercially manufactured goods in films seemed to have coincided with the appearance and subsequent popularity of Reese’s pieces in E.T. Before that, the use of commercially manufactured goods was called with various other names such as ‘tie-ups’, ‘tie-ins’, ‘plugs’ and ‘trade outs’.