In search for more money, sometimes directors and movie studios will seek out paid product placement deals to help bolster a film’s budget. Movies may also include “organic” product placement. In organic product placement, brands appear in a way that you might expect them to in the real world. For example, if you go to a bar in real-life, you can likely expect to see brands such as Budweiser and Busch. In organic product placement, brands typically do not pay to have their products featured and are instead included for the sake of realism. Organic product placement is typically subtle and happens in the background, while paid product placement is usually obvious. Unlike organic product placement, where the product is included for realism, paid product placement is included for the sake of advertising a product and getting the viewer to think about the brand. You can usually overlook organic product placement, but when it comes to paid product placement, it is usually a lot less subtle.
In this month’s blog post, I have taken a look at films that have the highest amount of product placement per every ten minutes and have analyzed how subtle or how obvious the product placement is. I have rated the subtleness of the product placement on a three-point scale. Movies that include over-the-top product placement for the sake of satire or parody have been given a negative rating, while films featuring particularly abhorrent displays of product placement have been given a zero out of three. All other movies run on a one to three scale, with one being the least subtle and three being the most subtle.
An interesting point that I discovered while doing this research was that the number of product placements every ten minutes does not necessarily relate to how subtle or obvious the product placement in the film is. For example, while “Ocean’s 8” might clobber the viewer over the head with its grandiose displays of product placement for high end clothing and jewelry, “Mean Girls” on the other hand has only one less product every ten minutes and is much more subtle with how it includes product placement. Likewise, “Power Rangers” only has one product placement every ten minutes, but the way in which the product placement is incorporated into the film is so shamelessly obvious that it is likely one of the most obvious entries in this blog.
