Very thought-provoking piece in G2 today about product placement - and the next wave of it, which is called digital insertion. There were two watershed moments for me in my awareness of this thing that everybody else already knew about. One was JUNO. Thats a wonderful movie with a pin-sharp screenplay by Diablo Cody and one of Ellen Pages best performances ever, but it was almost spoiled for me by the obtrusive references to Sunny D and TicTacs. Sunny D, if you have memories that go back as far as 1999, was the notorious fruit juice that had to be withdrawn from supermarket shelves after an overdose of it allegedly turned a toddler bright orange. But in JUNO it miraculously becomes a synonym for orange juice. The second moment, although I never read it, was Fay Weldons novel The Bulgari Connection. Weldon accepted a commission from Bulgari diamonds where basically she promised to mention their product a dozen times in the book, for an up-front fee of £18000. I hated this, and still do. Someone said something to me last week that helped me to pinpoint why. Reading a novel feels like picking up one half of a conversation, with the author as the other half. Its very uncomfortable to feel that other people are listening on the line. Even more uncomfortable to think that you, as a reader, are a commodity that the author has pre-sold to an advertiser. The Guardian article is here. Its examples are more up-to-date than mine... bit.ly/1pA7uVE
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 07:40:20 +0000
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