One of the things that elicit the outbursts of “Give me a break” from movie audiences almost more than anything else in theaters is when blatant product placements are noticed. Take Iron Man for example… when Tony Stark gets out of his car and Jon Favreau (his driver and also the director of the movie) hands him a CLEARLY blatant “Burger King” bag.
Personally, I don’t mind product placements as long as they fit into the scene. For example, if the scene calls for a laptop in it, I don’t mind if the laptop has a clearly visible Apple logo on it. If a scene calls for a cell phone, I don’t care if it’s visibly a Blackberry. (A whole post could be done on product placement).
So how do we feel when we see movies getting in bed with products even just for the marketing? There is a new trend in film marketing where we see a commercial that is for both the movie AND a particular product at the same time. Here are a couple of examples:
IRON MAN AND LG CELL PHONES
SPEED RACER AND ROADRUNNER INTERNET
ZOHAN AND THE NBA
Now this sort of market whoring has been around for a while… but lately it seems it’s getting more and more prevalent. Seems like every time I turn on the TV I see one of these cross bread commercials. And I don’t know why… but they bug the hell out of me. It’s funny… product placement (if done right) doesn’t really phase me at all… but this kind of marketing makes me hate both the product and the movie just a little bit inside.
So my question is, what do you think of these commercials? Do they bother you? Do they not phase you at all? What are some other movie/product commercial mixes that you remember seeing?
