Movie Marketing and PR News: Product Placement
Product Placement
7-Eleven has earned the product placement coup of the year. The 24-hour chain is going to be the Terminator franchise’s partner in crime for the Terminator Salvation movie.
Ducati motorcycles are getting their turn in the spotlight, after being seen in such films as The Expendables, and of course the latest product placement darling Terminator: Salvation.
A rep for the motorbikes told Variety:
“Although we’re a big brand, we’re a premium brand, and movies help get us awareness for our products,” Viola said. “It gives us exposure to the general public that we don’t normally speak to. I still hear about (the placement in) ‘Fled,’ and that was a long time ago”
Bollywood Not Hollywood Enough With Movie Merchandising
Bollywood is the most fertile and most prolific movie industry in the world. So why isn’t its merchandising sales up to par with that of Tinseltown’s whopping 16 million movie merchandising sales receipts? This lament from Bollywood movie giant Reliance BIG Pictures is typical,
“The Indian market is yet to catch up with movie merchandising. But there is great potential for the movie merchandise business to grow,” Saurabh Varma, chief marketing officer of Reliance BIG Pictures, said.
Ironically, the Bollywood film merchandising industry is marred by bootlegging! Another reason noted by The Indian Times is overall skepticism about the blockbuster potential of movies being released By some accounts, some Indian movie executives adopt wait-and-see attitude, by which time moviegoers have already moved on, in an industry inundated by releases.
Meanwhile, Bollywood movie marketing executives are doing what they can to fully leverage movie success into merchandise sales success with cross-promotions with clothing companies and retail chains.
But some can’t help but compare Hollywood’s widely-praised merchandising infrastructure to its slowly progressing Bollywood kin:
”If you look at a Hollywood movie, the revenues are split evenly between theatre (ticket) sales, home entertainment and merchandise. In India, cinema merchandise at the moment generates nothing. That is going to change with malls and multiplexes and a middle class of hundreds of millions,” said Andrew Heffernan of Eros International, the producers of “Drona”.
Gradually, but surely, they’ll get there.
[source]
Movie Business and Big Tobacco Were Bosom Buddies? No!
When James Dean puffed a cigarette in Rebel Without a Cause in a gesture that many came to regard as the ultimate symbol of super masculinity and manliness, when Bette Davis and Paul Henreid lighted two cigarettes simultaneously in the 1939 film Now, Voyager, it was all premeditated, according to a study by Dr. Stanley Glantz of the journal Tobacco Control.
“One justification for smoking in the movies is the fact that there was a lot of smoking in the golden age of Hollywood, and that smoking on-screen is part of the art of making films, something used from the beginning to create mood and develop character, and you see these iconic old movies being cited over and over again. These old documents blow away that myth and show that it was not artistry but big business, involving huge amounts of money.”
Glantz and his team studied nearly 200 actors’ contracts and uncovered that far from being a candid act, smoking in the movies was part of a direct dalliance that movie studios and cigarette-manufacturers. The former
“negotiated cigarette ad deals, insisted on publicity for themselves and their latest films, and directly benefited from millions of dollars in tobacco advertising in newspapers, magazines, and nationwide radio campaigns”.
And this product placement worked like no other, prompting over 200,000 of America’s youths to adapt smoking each year, according to Dr. Glantz’s study.