Product Placement: In Your Face Or In The Background?

It’s not too hard to imagine the hot air balloon in Jules Verne’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Day’s in the shape of the Michelin Man (Image credit: Midjourney)

By Aria Novosedlik

From 1882, when Édouard Manet painted ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’, which happened to have two bottles of Bass beer depicted in it to the iconic 1993 Seinfeld episode featuring Junior Mints to 2012’s Hawaii 5-0 episode featuring a nonstop :50 sales pitch for Subway by actor Taylor Wiley that was actually part of the episode’s narrative, product placement has demonstrated remarkable staying power as a marketing tactic.

Édouard Manet’s painting ‘The Bar at the Folies Bergère’: almost as famous for the bottles of Bass beer depicted in it as for the fact that it was an Impressionistic masterpiece.

We’ll never really know if Manet’s ‘placement’ was simply a literal representation of what he saw, or if he had a little deal with Bass beer on the side. In another story from the same period, Jules Verne, science fiction icon and author of books like Around the World in 80 Days and Journey to the Centre of the Earth was so famous that brands wanted to be written into his stories, so we know the idea was commercialized from its earliest days.

That was then. But now that we fast forward through everything, resort to Netflix, use adblockers, and revolt against YouTube’s insistence on waiting to press that damn ‘skip’ button, brands have got to rely on either using subtle product placement or just being blatant about it. 

Jerry and Kramer watch in horror as they accidentally drop a Junior Mint into a patient's chest cavity while observing  open heart surgery.

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Over the years the debate on the merits of product placement has toggled back and forth between these two extremes, from making the product look like it just naturally belongs in the shot, as if you expect it to be there, to taking it over the top and hitting you over the head with it. Like this article’s subtitle points out, it depends on who you’re appealing to. Subtlety has historically won the day for the boomer crowd, whereas Gen-Z thinks that’s too sneaky and would rather you just make it obvious. At least it’s more honest that way.

The TV series Modern Family gave Apple free placement in a 2015 episode entirely shot on Apple mobile devices. (image credit: ABC News)

Let’s look at the behemoth that is Apple. Apple has gone for the latter approach. The brand has unassailable equity. It’s unerringly consistent (despite the occasionally flawed release – like the MacBook Pro 2019). But when the Wall Street Journal recently reported that after sampling seventy-four Apple TV+ show episodes, there were over 700 Apple product placements, either on set or actively being used by characters, the brand’s command of the product placement space was undisputed.

Apple is by far the most placed brand in both cinema and TV (Source: MacDaily News)

Apple is also rumoured to have a rule that no ‘bad guy’ or ‘evil character’ can ever use an Apple product. They may have even actually pushed for evil characters to use Androids. Even when it comes to the ‘good guys’ from non-Apple TV+ projects, they must be vetted. Apple’s level of brand control is second to none.

There’s product placement, and there’s also the absolute reverse. It’s not illegal to allude to another brand and pooh-pooh it; that said, Gen-Z may hate you for being a hater.  Gen-Z has had the ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ buttons hammered into their skulls. Nuance? Not a thing for them. Feelings towards brands are so polar, you are either explicitly selling the brand and giving a vigorous nod to it, or your brand is just a total easter egg that will explode once some thirteen-year-old decides that it’s ‘brat’ or ‘gucci’.

Taylor Wiley's character pitches the wonders of the Subway diet during an episode of Hawaii 5-O in 2012. At 50 seconds, it might as well be a commercial, but it's actually woven into the narrative of the show.

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What’s happening now, though, doesn’t have anything to do with what brands want to sell to the consumer, but how they want to sell it to them. It's about the holy grail of personalization – and the tyranny of the all-powerful algorithm.

A step in that direction can be seen in a recent innovation, where green screen tech has been engineered to cover certain areas of TV and movie sets—everything from pop cans to billboards in background shots. Those, along with your personal data (your online shopping interest, social data, etc) are going to be utilized to serve you ever more precisely targeted advertising. 

I don’t know about you, but there’s something creepy about knowing that when I am streaming an episode of my favourite series, the beer they’re drinking may not be the same one as my friends saw. 

Aria Novosedlik is a designer, writer and researcher based in Toronto.