What brand of sneakers does Marty McFly wear in Back to the future? What is Carrie´s guilty ”shoe-pleasure” in Sex and the city? What brand is Scarlett Johanson and Ewan McGregor´s tracksuits in The Island? You probably know the answer to at least one of the questions listed above. Studies show that product placement in movies is easily noticed by viewers and they remember the products and brands they are exposed of.
Product placements in movies can be something as little as a two second screen shot of the logo of a brand, a character using a product, or a product just about being it´s own part of the plot. Here are some famous examples:
In Seinfeld there are many examples of embedded marketing. My favourite is the episode in which Kramer drops a Junior Mint into the bowels of a patient undergoing surgery just after uttering ”Who´s gonna turn down a Junior Mint? It´s chocolate, it´s peppermint, it´s fantastic!”. The junior mint plays a vital part of the plot in this episode. In Cast away the main character played by Tom Hanks´best friend is a volleyball that goes by the name of Wilson.
Studies show that viewers do remember products and brand from movies. If the viewer is distracted or if there is a time-delay between the viewing and the recall, the explicit memory fades but the unconscious memory prevails. Naturally, if you remember something like someone saying “junior mints are fantastic” but you cannot consciously remember where you heard it or who said it, the memory can trigger a want for that product.
Michael Bay, director of The Island takes advantage of this knowledge:
And in Sex and the city 2, Carrie tries on wedding gowns from 7 –seven different designers and falls in love with Vivienne Westwoods creation at the end:
Not everyone is so fond of embedded marketing as Michael Bay and Michael Patrick King; this is what David Lynch thinks about product placement:
sources:
Law and Brown 2000 I´ll have what she´s having: Gauging the impact of product placements n viewers
Shapiro and Krishnan 2001 memory based assessments fo measuring advertising effects. A compraison of explicit and implicit memory effects
Gerd's Consumer Behavior Blog 