The business section of yesterday's
New York Times included an
interesting article by Stuart Elliott about the Turner Classic Movies series
"Product Placement in the Movies," which will air each Friday in March.
In the article, Eliott writes: "The series is timely because product placement and other methods of embedding advertising within programming are growing more popular among marketers. The goal is to find the most effective way to reach consumers, who are increasingly able to elude commercials and other traditional interuptive sales tactics by using digital video recorders.
"For those marketers and movie buffs who believe that product placement began in 1982 when the Reece's Pieces brand of candy sold by Hershey was featured in
E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, the series provides a surprising corrective. It turns out that Madison Avenue and Hollywood have been working together in earnest since the 1930s -- and in some isolated instances, evidence indicates, even before then...
"The earliest example of product placement [found by Jay Newell, an assistant professor at the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University, who conceived the series and served as a consultant on it,] involved films from 1896 created by Auguste and Louis Lumiere for Francois-Henri Lavanchy-Clark, the Swiss representative for the Sunlight brand of soap sold by Lever Brothers (now Unilever). One film shows a cart bearing the Sunlight name parked on a street, Mr. Newell said, and another shows 'people doing their wash.'
"To help explain product placement to viewers, [Charles Tebesh, senior vice president of programming for Turner Classic Movies in Atlanta, said the cable station] will run shorts before and after the films [in the series] featuring a longtime specialist in the field, George R. Simkowski, president of a company in Norridge, Ill., named
Let's Go Hollywood. Mr. Norris will discuss the practice and present examples."
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posted by Steve Gallagher @ 3/01/2005 10:18:00 AM
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