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I watched a movie on last weekend. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an excellent book from Douglas Adams. Now there is a movie about it. It’s not a bad movie, not a masterpiece either. Anyway, that’s not a point in here.
One of the main characters, Arthur Dent, is using a phone in the movie. It is not just any phone it is a S60 phone, Nokia 7610. So Nokia has done a movie product placement in here. Fortunately this time outcome was quite ok. Product was not underlined too much. It wasn’t anything like Cellular, the movie what was built totally around the product. 90 minutes advertisement is not exactly what consumers are waiting for when entering to movie theatre. There are excellent product placement examples on TV. Absolutely Fabulous made good work by displaying fancy kitchen stuff and Bollinger shampagne. Not so many women had heard about Manolo shoes, before Sex and the city devoted one show to Manolo Blahnik. But now I’m entering to area I don’t know that well.
Comments
That phone wasn't a bad choice, but for an american movie, they could've done a much more effective marketing job if they used a phone popular in america, like the Motorola V3. Americans here don't recognize its model number "V3", but they instead know that phone by the name RAZR, and it's common to see everyone referring to it as "the razor phone". I'm not saying the movie should've used a Motorola phone, but the 7610 could've gained a lot more recognition in the States if Nokia marketed it by giving it a unique, one-word name, like Motorola did to their V3. This kind of marketing seems to catch on very well here in the States, and I'm sure Nokia could make some good use of it :)
Posted by: Radu Popescu | November 11, 2005 03:28 AMI did some digging and found out that Nokia has been quite active when it comes to product placement.
Posted by: Nicolas | February 7, 2006 07:12 PMI wrote my thesis on product placement, particularly on the different semiotics used for communicating the brand image. I must say that "Cellular" is a good example of a production completely abusing the Nokia brand. The whole point is obviously to advertise it. But an interesting thought is the actual effect on the audience? No one can miss it, and the instant natural reaction from most people would be that they have just paid for a 90 min commercial. I.e. most probably negative. Especially because of the cheesy punch line in the end. But would more discrete and subtle product placement be better? The Bollinger placement in some of the newer 007 productions were excellent from that point of view, but is more or less better in this case? Conscious or "sub-conscious" product placement?
Posted by: joey | July 30, 2007 09:34 PMMore importantly, in my opinion, is that the product placement is a true representation of the actual product. That's what annoyed me the most about the movie Cellular (and other movies) is that the devices aren't portrayed as they actually are. Fake screens are the worst. If it's not really going to look like that, all you're doing is setting yourself up to dissatisfy your customer. Not a wise move.
On the same note, I don't think product placement, obvious or not, is a bad thing, if it's tasteful. If the product is legitimately being used by the character in the context of the movie, I got no problems. If he stops what he's doing and says, "I'll use my Nokia N95 to make the call." yeah, that's shady and annoying.
Posted by: Ricky Cadden