Product Placement

Think back to the last time you were at the movies, and one of the characters was holding or using a product that you recognized; a food item, a laptop computer, a car, doesn’t matter, so long as it was a product that you could purchase for yourself if you had a mind to. Did it make you want to go out and buy the same product? Well, if not, somebody just blew a large amount of money for nothing. Product appearances like this are called Product Placements, and companies pay big money to have their product be the key item that James Bond uses to sold the puzzle, catch the bad guys, save the world, or just get the girl – in the hopes that you will believe that if you buy the same product you can get the fame, fortune, glory and/or sex.

In recent times, Product Placements have begun turning up in television shows, video games, even on the Internet, as audiences become more and more jaded (and therefore more and more immune to normal advertising stunts). In a straightforward business sense it’s a very clever idea – if your product is seen by all of the people who have tuned in to a hit television show, you’ve effectively reached the same number of people who would have seen a commercial placed in the same program slot, if you’d bought one. Even better, people won’t be out of the room getting a snack or going to the lavatory when your product placement hits the screen. Of course, you will only get a fraction of the screen time, but you’re probably not paying quite as much for the placement as you would for an ad.

An especially good example of this turned up on the Food Network’s program The Next Iron Chef over the weekend. Now, I know I promised to stop writing about reality TV, and about the Food Network in general, but this one was so good I’m going to forget that I did. This series follows eight competitors who are vying for a spot on the Iron Chef America program – a kind of “American Gladiators” meets “Survivor” contest in which a guest chef attempts to prepare better food than one of a group of champions who regularly appear (the “Iron Chefs” of the title), given a surprise secret ingredient and only one hour to perform.

To those of us who still eat food ordered by yelling into a clown’s head, this may seem a bit fantastical, but the title of “Iron Chef” is apparently taken quite seriously in the business. The eight competitors in the “Next Iron Chef” show have all be on the main program before, and in fact are all competitors who won. The Food Network therefore knows that they are good enough to compete and win (at least once) and telegenic enough to appeal to the television audience. How much of this spin-off is an actual competition and how much of it is just an extended audition I couldn’t tell you; I’m not sure anyone short of the Network executives really knows. What I do know is that in the last episode they had one of the best product placements I’ve ever seen.

The challenge was to come up with a new airline meal suitable for the best first class service in the world, featuring an Airbus A380 (the newest, biggest and fanciest airliner ever built) in service with Lufthansa (the airline generally considered to have the best food in the sky). The product placement was an actual A380, in Lufthansa colors, in which the competitors had to prepare their offerings for the judges. I’m not sure if it was Lufthansa or Airbus who came up with this, but either way it was brilliant. Airbus got to show off their newest (and most expensive) creation and have the show gush over how fancy it was, and Lufthansa got to preen about how good their food was. I suspect that both companies were in on it; certainly, they both got terrific value for their advertising dollar…