Drifter's Thoughts: Product Placement
Through a great deal of my viewing of review shows online, such as the Nostalgia Critic and The Spoony Experiment, I've noticed elements about games and movies that I never would have been aware of during my first time viewing/playing them. While I don't agree with every critique that the aforementioned shows have made, I have noticed a very common issue that a lot of critics have in the media of this generation, product placement.
There's no denying it, adverts are pretty much everywhere we look; bus stops, buildings, even on packaging that we look at every day. But what really gets under the skin of a lot of critics seems to be the input of advertising in films, television shows and even some video games. Personally I haven't had the same irritation as others who have gotten riled up over seeing the Coca Cola logo in a movie, but is the hate against product placement really justified as a whole?
Well, in order to start answering that, we need to know what exactly product placement is. In essence, it's a way of maintaining a budget, it's how developers and producers get their creations made and published. It's not uncommon for big name productions to be correlated with big name products; British television channels such as ITV, Channel 4 and the more recent Dave rely on ad breaks and their respective programmes have sponsor bumpers in order to get their funding.
The same can be said for movies; Sony is a manufacturer of hardware as well as a film company, so it's natural for them to want to boost their products. Some products are even used for natural character needs, such as the main character needing a drink. It would be pretty natural for them to pick up a Starbucks or a Bud Light, as long as it made sense in terms of the environment and situation of the scene.
As for video games, their product links come from a strong correlation with what their audience enjoy. While it's become a self-aware joke nowadays, the Call Of Duty series thrives on co-operating with Mountain Dew because it sells with their target audience. The Yakuza games feature real drink products available in Japan, as well as an in-game arcade promoting other Sega characters and titles other than Sonic.
So in good cases, product placement can work as a friendly reminder towards the viewer or player to inform them about something they might like. The viewer will most likely be interested in what they see, the movie or game company gets their sponsor money, everybody wins.
But what about the product placement that gets critics annoyed? What about the less subtle attempts at selling a brand?
Companies have been trying to push their products ever since advertising started, and it was only a matter of time before they started putting their products into entertainment. Disruptive or forced product placement was even parodied in the film Wayne's World and the movie Space Jam was essentially born from a commercial. But that was in the 80s and 90s, a different time. Films are much less likely to disrupt the story to boost the sales of a new pair of trainers or a new phone on the market.
But on the Internet it's much different, and seems to be where most of the complaints on product placement come from. It's no secret that nobody likes pop-up ads or advertising that they can't escape. Pre-video ads on YouTube and Blip are one of the main reasons why AdBlock is such a popular app for Google Chrome users, but why? They're just like brand name drops in a film or show, only the money goes to lesser known video makers rather than big name companies. One of the main reasons comes from the adverts themselves, they're disruptive for the viewer.
Sometimes people go onto a video expecting an ad at the front, but it won't stop them from being irritated by it. The creator of the video only has so much control as to what kind of ad is played at the front of their video, and not every advert is going to appeal to every viewer. Not every product is going to hold interest for every who sees or hears about it, it's a simple fact that we're all different and we all have different ways of going about our days and lives. So naturally there are some things that companies are going to push to get noticed that will be completely ignored by a lot of people.
Again, these forms of advertising and product placement are mostly for producers to gain funding for their projects and businesses. So why are they so disruptive for the viewers? Well for one thing, it takes the viewers out of the experience of the video. Say you were getting ready to watch a new let's play episode by NintendoCapriSun, but before you can get to any of that, you have to be told about a new sale at a home installment store that you have and never have had any interest in going to. Or if the ad was telling you about the new album by an artist who you don't care about in a genre that's just not your taste.
Naturally you would become irritated and just want to get on with the video you came to watch in the first place. Now thankfully a lot of pre-video ads can be skipped after a short time, an invaluable decision by a majority of advertisers. But the bad taste of being forced to have something you have no interest forced into your face still lingers, even if it's only there for five seconds before you can skip it. Meanwhile on Blip they also have pre-video ads, but a lot of users on sites like Channel Awesome (previously ThatGuyWithTheGlasses) have mid-video ads.
This is where the creator of the video allows a gap in their project for there to be a second video commercial. This is more disruptive for the viewer because they will have become immersed in the video, only to be pulled out of the experience to be told about a new car on the market. However Blip users have a large awareness of how their viewers will react to this, and at least do something to telegraph when an ad break is about to happen.
While a majority of Blip ads can't be skipped, they also don't require any mandatory input from the viewer, such as option selection or stimulating a products capabilities through a flash animation. Those actions are actually very rare in online adverts, and only really show up to give the viewer some kind of variety in what they're shown.
With films on the other hand, the disruption is a bit different since it's controlled by a company rather than a small name creator or team. One major complaint is advertising on DVDs. Anyone who's ever owned or played a DVD has known the unparalleled annoyance of having to go through multiple trailers for films that have been out for years or feature such as Blu-Ray that were new and ground-breaking back then, but are the norm by the time the DVD is being played again.
This is because advertisers on DVDs remain in the here and now, however in the ever-moving film industry, the here and now becomes the been and gone much quicker than people would like to think, so trailers can get old very quickly once the film is out in the cinema and subsequently on home media. With online adverts, they can at least be changed up once a new product needs to be boosted or when the current advert finally becomes stale, to the advertisers as well as the customers. With a DVD, a trailer or ad stays on there is there forever, much to the annoyance of anyone returning to an old movie.
Of course sometimes the issue with advertising in media can come down to the presentation of the advert itself rather than where it's placed. An advert that's forced down your throat is never fun to sit through, no matter what the subject is. There was a YouTube advert for a new David Mitchell DVD at the time, and the narration for it was almost forcing the viewer to click on the ad and order it, being under the assumption that everyone loves and needs David Mitchell in their comedic life.
This obviously can leave viewers more irritated than regular adverts. It can be the same for films as well; the aforementioned Space Jam has a line in its script dedicated solely to cramming as many product names in as possible. However, it's debatable that this may have been a joke by the writers, given the origins of the film.
But one of the main issues I've seen with product placement isn't actually to do with product placement at all, but how critics perceive it. I mentioned previously that a lot of critics have a very big gripe against product placement in what they review, whether it be games or movies. From what I've seen of a lot of their rants on product placement moments, the brands in questions aren't even doing anything worse than disrupting the plot of the game or film to say how great the new Snickers bar is or that Subway is really great; it's just kind of...there.
It's almost as if a lot of online critics have cemented a common theory that all product placement is disruptive and bad and that it's all the fault of the media it's in. But at the end of the day, seeing the Pepsi logo in the background of a street level in Bionic Commando or in a Sylvester Stallone movie isn't going to ruin the medium it's in, that's down to what makes the subject of review work, such as plot, camerawork or gameplay.
During Zero Punctuation's review of the Bionic Commando reboot, Yahtzee makes a clear and drawn out point about how much he dislikes the use of the Pepsi logo and how much he hates Pepsi as a drink. Whereas his only criticism of its placement in the game was that the drink machines it was placed on couldn't be thrown at enemies. It didn't kill the gameplay, there were far more different ways to defend himself in the game and the fact that the machines were immovable was made early on in the game.
In terms of film, there was a video not to long ago pointing out all of the Sony products put into The Amazing Spiderman 2, a Sony Pictures production. Some of the products weren't even all that outlined as Sony-owned and would completely go over the heads of people watching the film unless they actively stopped caring about the story and stared at the tiny text in the background for the whole film. Looking into a film after repeating viewing can be a good way of seeing or finding out things that would go over the heads of casual observers; but doing it for the sole purpose of finding faults in a film will definitely be seen as needlessly nit-picking.
So really, at the end of the day, IS product placement really all that bad? Well, it really depends on where it is. At the end of the day, sponsoring and name-dropping is how things gets done, how invoices get signed, how films and games are made. It can subtle, it can be disruptive, it can be interesting, it can completely uninteresting, it can be almost anything, all depending on the viewer. How somebody plays or watches a medium, how somebody approaches an advert, how somebody reacts to it, how it would affect them.
Not all adverts are the same, they're not meant to be. They can be just like us. Sometimes we have our names dropped to people who might be able to use us for something, sometimes we have to get up on stage and say who we are and what we can do to make both our lives and our potential clients lives better. Sometimes we can be annoying, but it's all about how we present ourselves. Sometimes people will judge us for who we are or what we stand for without us even opening our mouths or doing anything.
The next time you roll your eyes at seeing a lacklustre film poster at the bus stop, just think for a second. It's OK not to like what you see, somebody will be interested in it and no-one is forcing you to see it.
