How Marketing is Taking Over the Film
Industry
By Kaleem Aftab
The Independent
August 15th, 2008
James Bond is in deadly peril, so he does what every
self-respecting action hero would do: checks the time on
his watch and makes sure he has his car keys, thus
ensuring that the brands that paid handsomely for the
positioning are showcased.
We can all laugh at this blatant commercialism – and
much of the time we do. But now that product placement
has become the norm (and thus quite easy to ignore),
some brands are coming up with increasingly
surreptitious means of showcasing their products – even
to the extent of becoming film financiers. Eurostar,
whose old home at Waterloo was heavily featured last
year in The Bourne Ultimatum, decided to announce its
move to St Pancras by paying for Shane Meadows’s new
film, Somers Town.
The advantage in financing the picture is that
companies have complete control over how and where their
logos are used. Also, with new digital technologies it
is cheaper to make a low-budget film than to pay for
product placement in a blockbuster. When Eurostar
originally approached Meadows, it wanted him to make a
short film of around 30 minutes in length. Recently,
funding short films has become a popular marketing ploy
for companies targeting young audiences. In return for
the cash, they get their products showcased. These films
will usually be submitted to festivals or put on to the
internet.
The plan for the Meadows project changed when the
director declared that Somers Town would work better as
a feature-length film. The cross-channel train company
was happy to oblige, and when the film was nearing
completion it used an agency to approach distributors to
come up with innovative ways of presenting the film to
the public. The implication was that creating brand
awareness was more important than box-office returns.
However, when Somers Town was accepted into the
Berlin International Film Festival it started to receive
good advance word. Meadows had made a delightful low-key
black-and-white comedy about childhood friendship. A boy
from the Midlands runs away from home and is befriended
and helped in London by a young Polish immigrant, whose
dad is a builder working on the construction of the new
Eurostar terminal at St Pancras.
I liked the film but found the numerous plugs for
Eurostar tedious: for no reason whatsoever, the boys
would inform each other that “it only takes two hours to
go to Paris” and on several occasions they walked past
posters for the company. The ending sees the boys taking
the train to Paris. Next week, the 74-minute movie is
being released in cinemas, and the marketing of the film
omits to mention Eurostar’s involvement. Audiences are
being duped into parting with their cash to watch this
glorified advert.
In the early days of television, companies would act
as underwriters for shows; drama serials got the moniker
“soaps” from their washing-powder sponsors. Wings, the
first film to win a Best Picture Oscar, back in 1927,
contained a plug for Hershey’s. The 1980s saw the
explosion in product placement in movies. Blockbusters
such as Back to the Future showcased futuristic cars,
while Spike Lee’s indie hit She’s Gotta Have It featured
sneakers from a certain shoe company. Brands pay huge
amounts to have their wares featured in blockbusters.
The Eighties excess of product-placement soon led to
a backlash, and savvy brands have started to take a
dramatic new approach that is far harder to spot. Apple,
for example, makes a big play out of the fact that it
doesn’t pay for product placement. Instead, it has
cultivated relationships with many of the top
prop-masters.
And it’s not just brands that are getting in on the
act: Tom McCarthy’s recent indie favourite The Visitor
received partial financing from pressure group
Participant Media, which claims to be “the leading
provider of entertainment that compels and inspires
social change”. McCarthy says of the relationship, “My
one concern before agreeing to accept their money – and,
admittedly, that came down to a decision on how to
finance the movie– was that they would try to put the
message first. I said, ‘Look, this has to be a character
movie and not an issue film’... audiences want to see a
good story and they don’t want to be taught something.”
Another fruitful partnership was cemented in Olivier
Assayas’s Summer Hours: the film promotes the Musée
d’Orsay, as the museum came up with the original idea.
As Assayas explains: “They couldn’t invest money but
they allowed us to take some pieces out of the museum to
use in the film and shoot in the museum at a reduced
rate.”
There is no indication while watching these films of
the influence being wielded on the script. The heavily
disguised marketing methods means audiences watching a
movie now need to be as savvy about who is financing a
film as they are about directors and stars.
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