{"id":876,"date":"2006-12-04T08:39:24","date_gmt":"2006-12-04T08:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/04\/product-placement\/"},"modified":"2006-12-04T08:39:24","modified_gmt":"2006-12-04T08:39:24","slug":"product-placement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/04\/product-placement\/","title":{"rendered":"Product Placement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another idle thought inspired by the Bond movie (I may or may not post comments about the movie as a whole, but you can check out Kate’s spoiler-laden comments<\/a>. I liked it a little more than she did, but I’m more familiar with the genre, and willing to cut them more slack…):<\/p>\n

From what I can tell, this movie appears to have gotten about 50% of its budget from product placement. Any time Bond uses his laptop, the shot is carefully set up to put the big “VAIO” logo right in the center of the screen. His magic cell phone gets almost as much screen time as the girl, and there’s even a scene where he’s driving a rental car, and they make sure to throw the Ford logo in your face. I’m surprised they didn’t identify the manufacturer of the rope used in the torture scene.<\/p>\n

I mentioned this on the way back, and Kate said, “Well, they can’t all be Rex Stout.”<\/p>\n

Which made me wonder about the whole history of product placement. For those who haven’t read them, in Rex Stout’s umpteen books about Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, nearly all the brands are fake. The car they drive, the gun Archie uses, the booze they drink, the papers they read– everything is made up, as near as I can tell.<\/p>\n

My question is, why is that? Is it just some weird ethical quirk on the part of Rex Stout, or was that a general practice way back in the day, and he just kept it up longer than anyone else? I don’t recall there being nearly as much brand fudging in, say, Raymond Chandler.<\/p>\n

Also, when did ostentatious product placement start to be a common practice in movies? There are jokes about it in spoof movies going back to the early 80’s at least, so it was well established before that, but does anybody know who the first person to think up the idea was?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another idle thought inspired by the Bond movie (I may or may not post comments about the movie as a whole, but you can check out Kate’s spoiler-laden comments. I liked it a little more than she did, but I’m more familiar with the genre, and willing to cut them more slack…): From what I… Continue reading Product Placement<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,35,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-movies","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}