Product placement

[Enterprise is Great]

No but it's weird seeing the Pan Am logo in a movie taking place in 2001 long after it ceased to exist.

[Nerys Myk]

Enterprise is Great wrote:

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No but it's weird seeing the Pan Am logo in a movie taking place in 2001 long after it ceased to exist.

Funny how "predicting" the future works.

[teacake]

We can only hope our children laugh their asses off at Uhura ordering a Budweiser for the same reason.

[King Daniel]

New companies can always come along and resurrect an old name/brand/logo/whatever.

If they have PADDs with Apple logos in STID, the irony may cause the universe to implode.

[JarodRussell]

The Wormhole wrote:

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Product placement is a sad reality of movies these days. Sometimes its painfully obvious, like in I, Robot Will Smith's character just happens to be into vintage products from the year the movie came out. Sometimes a movie has fun with its product placement, like Snakes on a Plane.

The article I linked to even described how it affects the screenplay because the companies come in and want to have it their way.

[Christopher]

Enterprise is Great wrote:

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No but it's weird seeing the Pan Am logo in a movie taking place in 2001 long after it ceased to exist.

Well, it's not like we had a manned expedition to Jupiter in 2001 (or a few years later, I think it was supposed to be) either.

KingDaniel wrote:

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If they have PADDs with Apple logos in STID, the irony may cause the universe to implode.

STID? If you're doing Roman numerals, that would be Star Trek 499. Gotta admire your optimism about the franchise's longevity.

[Titus Andronicus]

Christopher wrote:

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Well, it's not like we had a manned expedition to Jupiter in 2001 (or a few years later, I think it was supposed to be) either.

STID? If you're doing Roman numerals, that would be Star Trek 499. Gotta admire your optimism about the franchise's longevity.

I believe it's a reference to the rumored title, Star Trek Into Darkness.

Although if my great great great great great great......grandkids are enjoying new Trek films I'd be very happy for them, lol.

[Christopher]

Ahh, okay, I didn't see that until after reading that post. I'm up to speed now. And TrekMovie is saying it's definitely confirmed.

[King Daniel]

Yep, I was abbreviating the supposed new name.

499 Star Trek films... I'd like to see them try!

[ChristopherPike]

STID?

Of course, you realise in its abreviated form it could also stand for Sexually Transmitted Infective Disease?

Bad Robot Productions would kindly like to remind the ladies and gentlemen of the audience, that they are strongly advised to wear protection.

Christopher wrote:

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Easy to say, but it's not like they do it for fun. Without the revenue that comes from product placement, the studio could never afford to make a film as hugely expensive as a modern sci-fi blockbuster. So it's just something we have to accept as a necessary tradeoff for getting the movie made at all -- just like commercial breaks are the necessary tradeoff for getting TV shows made. (And more and more shows these days have built-in product placements because it's gotten so easy to fast-forward or channel-surf through commercials.)

It's not unreasonable that some corporations might survive a few more centuries. The longest-lived independent company in history, Japan's Kongō Gumi, lasted for 1,400 years. Various hotels and breweries and such have been in business for up to a millennium. The Beretta firearms company is nearly 500 years old, as is Cambridge University Press.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

Still, I tend to feel that for an SF film, it would make more sense to have product placements for the likes of aerospace firms and computer manufacturers, or maybe biotech or energy companies, rather than something like soft drinks.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to which companies are willing to invest in your movie, so the filmmakers may not have complete freedom of choice about which products they have to work in. If you try to get IBM and Virgin Aerospace as financial backers but the best you can manage is Taco Bell and Geico, then you really don't have any choice but to posit a far future where Taco Bell and Geico are alive and well and haven't materially altered their corporate logos in centuries. (Although I think there are some cases where a film's production designers have been allowed to come up with new, futuristic logos that the advertisers actually used in their tie-in campaigns, with their approval, of course. I can't remember an example, though.)

That maybe true for untried things but all The Star Trek movies made a profit (some more than others) and most without any product placement. Trek is such a big media brand unto itself it shouldn't have to lower itself to things like that. $100 DVD sets anyone?

[Christopher]

SimpleLogic wrote:

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That maybe true for untried things but all The Star Trek movies made a profit (some more than others) and most without any product placement. Trek is such a big media brand unto itself it shouldn't have to lower itself to things like that. $100 DVD sets anyone?

What you need to understand is that movies today have gotten far more expensive. On top of which, most of the previous Trek movies were given mid-range budgets, whereas the Abrams movies are top-tier, tentpole movies. They're so expensive that Paramount and Bad Robot have had to bring in additional production partners simply to finance the films -- Spyglass Entertainment on the 2009 film and Skydance Productions on the upcoming sequel. Indeed, Skydance's whole reason for existing is to co-finance Paramount films. It's just hard to understand how insanely Hollywood production costs are ballooning these days. They have to get money any way they can, from multiple different sources.

There's also the fact that promotion goes both ways. What you can get in exchange for inserting a product placement in your film is help from the corporation in promoting your film with their commercials and tie-in products. And that's very important. Marketing, getting a film out there and into the public eye, is critical to its success. No Trek film since ST:TMP has really had a big tie-in marketing campaign until ST 2009. Paramount wanted to give it a big promotional push, to really turn it into a studio tentpole property. In the past, they didn't really have to, since ST was popular enough to promote itself -- but then ST's popularity faded and the films were too slow to adjust, which is probably a factor in why the last couple of TNG films had underwhelming box office (though admittedly not the only factor). This time around, Paramount really wanted to go all-out in promoting the film, and in modern times that requires getting sponsors to offer promotional tie-ins. And putting product placements for those sponsors in your film is often the tit for tat. Star Trek promotes Nokia in the movie, and Nokia in turn promotes Star Trek in its ads. It's just part of how the big-budget movie business works these days.

As for the DVD sets, the profits from those go to CBS, which owns the franchise as a whole. But Paramount makes the movies, because Paramount kept the rights to the former Viacom's motion picture properties when they split with CBS. So Paramount can't fund the movies with CBS's profits for the DVD sets.

I see. I still doubt its that hard to find funding though when the words "Star Trek" are mentioned. If it was there wouldn't be 12 movies. I just really feel that having an obvious product placement in the 'future' just cheapens the magic of the story a bit no matter the reason. Don't get me wrong it doesn't bother me as much as it may seem from my post but I can do without it for sure.

Might as well paint the Enterprise up like a NASCAR.

[Christopher]

SimpleLogic wrote:

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I see. I still doubt its that hard to find funding though when the words "Star Trek" are mentioned. If it was there wouldn't be 12 movies.

Times change. Star Trek was very popular for a while, but then its popularity faded. Paramount decided to relaunch it as a tentpole franchise, but they could no longer rely on the popularity it had formerly had a decade earlier. They had to approach it the same way they'd approach any other tentpole revival of a moribund franchise, the way they did with Mission: Impossible (remember, it was Abrams's success with M:I:III that convinced Paramount to ask him to do the same for Star Trek, its other Desilu-legacy franchise).

And, again, movies these days are insanely freaking expensive. You simply cannot rely on word of mouth when your film costs nine figures to make.

I just really feel that having an obvious product placement in the 'future' just cheapens the magic of the story a bit no matter the reason.

Like I said, some corporations have endured for centuries, a few for over a millennium. If we saw, say, Obi-Wan Kenobi downing a Pepsi or Bilbo Baggins wearing Levis, that would be a bit much, but the Star Trek universe is supposed to be the future of our Earth, and it's not that implausible that Budweiser, a brand that's already 136 years old, or Nokia, a company that was founded 147 years ago, would still exist 232-243 years from now.

I remember a Trek novel from the '80s, Crisis on Centaurus by Brad Ferguson, that had a scene with a Tellarite on Alpha Centauri using an American Express ATM. And that wasn't even a paid product placement. The author just assumed that some recognizable elements of our era would survive into the future.

Might as well paint the Enterprise up like a NASCAR.

Well, that's obviously not going to happen, but I wouldn't find it unbelievable if we saw that some of its components were imprinted with the names of real aerospace contractors or the like. The Space Shuttle's robot arm had its builder's logo on it, and I've seen photos of things like satellites or ISS components that had their makers' logos on them -- just as most vehicles and equipment down here on Earth are branded with their makers' logos. If anything, seeing all these futuristic spaceships in TV and movies without any manufacturers' logos of any kind on them is rather unrealistic.

[tighr]

teacake wrote:

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We can only hope our children laugh their asses off at Uhura ordering a Budweiser for the same reason.

Budweiser is actually very likely to still exist in 250 years. Nokia, maybe not.