Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [20]
The subjects took their seats in a darkened room, and the curtains went up.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT IN movies is as old as the medium itself. Even the pioneering Lumière brothers, two of the world’s first filmmakers, included several appearances of Lever’s sunlight soap in their early short films. Turns out, they had an associate on staff who moonlighted as a publicist for Lever Brothers (now Unilever). But product placement truly began to blossom in the 1930s. In 1932, White Owl Cigars provided $250,000 worth of advertising for the 1932 film Scarface, on the condition that star Paul Muni would smoke them in the movie. By the mid-1940s, it was rare to see a kitchen in a Warner Brothers film that didn’t have a spanking-new General Electric refrigerator, or a love story that didn’t end in a man presenting a woman with diamonds in a romantic display of undying devotion—the diamonds, of course, being sponsored by the DeBeers Company.7
Still, product placement as most of us know it today can be traced back to a little alien. For those who’ve never seen Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the story revolves around a solitary, fatherless boy named Elliott who discovers an extraordinary-looking creature living in the woods behind his house. To lure it out of hiding, the boy tactically places individual pieces of candy—instantly recognizable as Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces—along the path from the forest leading into his house.
But Spielberg didn’t choose this particular candy at random. The director first approached the Mars Company, the makers of M&Ms, to ask if they’d be willing to pay to have their product featured in the film. After they turned him down, Hershey agreed to step in, offering their Reese’s Pieces as a substitute. A very smart corporate decision, as it turns out—a week after the movie’s debut, sales of Reese’s Pieces tripled, and within a couple of months of its release, more than eight hundred cinemas across the country began stocking Reese’s Pieces in their concession stands for the first time.
Enter Tom Cruise. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, the U.S.-based sunglasses manufacturer Ray-Ban was fighting to stay alive as their sales figures remained dismally flat. That is, until the company struck a deal with Paul Brickman, the director of 1983’s Risky Business, and Tom Cruise gave the retro-looking shades a whole lot of renewed cachet. When the movie became a hit, Ray-Ban sales rose by over 50 percent.
But Cruise and his shades were just getting started. Three years later, in Tony Scott’s Top Gun, when the actor alit from his fighter jet clad in Air Force leathers and Aviator Ray-Bans, the sunglasses maker saw an additional boost of 40 percent to its bottom line. (It wasn’t just dark glasses that benefited from the success of Top Gun. Sales of leather aviator jackets surged as well, as did Air Force and Navy recruitment, the latter increasing by 500 percent.)
Ray-Ban’s success with product placement was reenacted again two decades later. In the six months after Will Smith wore what were now extremely retro shades in the 2002 film Men in Black II, the company’s sales tripled, amounting to what a company representative claimed was the equivalent of $25 million in free ads.8
But since the days of E.T. and Top Gun, product placement in the movies has grown to levels of near absurdity. When Die Another Day, a 2002 installment in the James Bond franchise, managed to display twenty-three brands over the course of 123 minutes, audiences were royally peeved. Most critics questioned the movie’s integrity, some even dubbing it Buy Another Day. But this was nothing compared to Sylvester Stallone’s 2001 Driven (which probably would have sparked similar outrage had people actually seen it), which managed to jam in 103 brands in 117 minutes—almost a brand every sixty seconds. More recently, the movie Transformers had unannounced cameos from AAA, Apple, Aquafina, AT&T, and Austin-Healey—and those were