Product placement has been going on for many years - even comedians mention brand names during their acts - and firms most certainly wouldn't support it if the return was not worthwhile.
What's more the "shelf life" of such product placements is exceptional, especially compared to the short time an advertisement is shown, as films etc will be shown for years to come.
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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The Audis in I Robot were mostly A2s and A4s although Will Smith drove a Le Mans concept.
All had major body kits covering the wheels. I've seen a thread on another forum with pics of one of the cars being driven down a public street in LA. It was before the film came out and people thought it was for real!
Lady Penelopes car in Thunderbirds was originally intended to be a Roller, but Rolls Royce in their wisdom decided against it, so Ford offered to make the big pink 6 wheeler as long as they got the rest of the cars. Lots of Focus' and Mondeos.
I watched Cat in the Hat over Christmas and took a while to wrok out the same conclusion. Ford everywhere.
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Manufacturers generally accept it's worth it, even though they're sometimes slow to catch on.
Jaguar refused to give an E Type to The Saint in the 1960s so Volvo stepped in and it couldn't have done any harm to them in terms of favourable exposure. Bear in mind that the cost of supplying a few cars wouldn't even cover the Marketing team's bar bill for an afternoon meeting of 'where can we advertise our car'
Naturally when Return Of The Saint came around in the 70s, Jaguar were first in the queue with a shiny new XJ-S parked outside the production office.
Pontiac worked hard to get their new Trans Am into Knight Rider, and they basically enjoyed an hour's free advertising every week all over the world, plus all the kids wanting to play with the toys etc.
Specialist vehicles are more work for the manufacturer, but it's really the same as a concept car - it'll get some photos in a magazine or newspaper, some time on the screen and maybe a few press ads. As usual with these things, Ford are on the ball and managed to put a clause in about using other Ford cars in the film too.
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Lady Penelopes car in Thunderbirds was originally intended to be a Roller, but Rolls Royce in their wisdom decided against it...
Wisdom; a commodity in painfully short supply at BMW I guess.
Hawkeye
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Stranger in a strange land
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Can't remember which James Bond it was, but SWMBO got mad at me after going to see it in the pictures and I explained to her that all the goodies had Ford Derived Cars and the baddies had the others. The one with the fantastic chase on the ice.
Goodies had Jaguar, Range Rover etc In fact, IIRC at one point a transport plane opens its doors and tips a selection of Porsche and Ferrari out the door!!
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Wasn't the ice chase one "Die Another Day"? I must say the worst one to date but the ice chase redeemed it.
Didn't the baddie have the green Jag XK though?
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Does it ever work the other way ? Has a manufacturer taken legal action after a film ( for example )makes their cars look inferior in a car chase, or is associated with criminal activity. You wouldn't want to buy one of those big American cop cars, they can't turn a corner without rolling over or crashing into a fruit stall.
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And all those dam boxes that litter the small alley ways...
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The number plates of cars in films sometimes gives a clue as to whether they were supplied by the manufacturer.
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L\'escargot.
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Does it ever work the other way ? Has a manufacturer taken legal action after a film ( for example)makes their cars look inferior in a car chase, or is associated with criminal activity.
VWs lawyers were all over Disney when The Love Bug was being made in 1968, the Beetle splitting in 2 at the end must have been a bit of a shock to them! When it was released it became the highest earning film in America for 1969 and of course did no harm to the car's reputation, so when the sequel came out in 1974 VW were all ready with an advertising campaign, dealer prizes etc.
More recently, the Playstation 2 game 'The Getaway' had one of the characters using a BT van to get to the next level of shooting and mayhem. BT ordered the game to be changed and I believe all newer versions of the game have a different van in them.
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Very true. To be fair, you can see why BT were unhappy. You don't just drive a BT Tranny Van, you have to enter a Police Station as a BT engineer and kill a few cops.
I wouldn't be all that happy either.
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Very true. To be fair, you can see why BT were unhappy. You don't just drive a BT Tranny Van, you have to enter a Police Station as a BT engineer and kill a few cops. I wouldn't be all that happy either.
It would never have happened if Buzby was still at the helm :-(
I'm sure video games are another source of easy advertising for manufacturers though, plus they don't have to produce any cars for it!
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>>I'm sure video games are another source of easy advertising for manufacturers though, plus they don't have to produce any cars for it!<<
On the flip side, I have a game called Driver 3. I'm sure those with PS2's will have heard of it but for those that haven't, it's a fairly realistic driving game.
However, none of the cars are real. Sure - you can tell that one looks awfully close to a Mustang without quite being one and another looks distinctly similar to a Cadillac Seville but they're not real. However, "NOKIA" is plastered everywhere throughout the game. The main character has a Nokia phone - so detailed that you can even tell what model it is. The Bus Stops, billboards and posters dotted about the various cities all have "NOKIA" emblazoned on them too.
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>>I'm sure video games are another source of easy advertising for manufacturers though, plus they don't have to produce any cars for it!<< On the flip side, I have a game called Driver 3. I'm sure those with PS2's will have heard of it but for those that haven't, it's a fairly realistic driving game. However, none of the cars are real. Sure - you can tell that one looks awfully close to a Mustang without quite being one and another looks distinctly similar to a Cadillac Seville but they're not real. However, "NOKIA" is plastered everywhere throughout the game. The main character has a Nokia phone - so detailed that you can even tell what model it is. The Bus Stops, billboards and posters dotted about the various cities all have "NOKIA" emblazoned on them too.
Nokia are still at it in Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory for the X-Box. All the computers found in the game have a Nokia screen saver. Some of the cut scenes between levels alo show Wrigley's Airwaves chewing gum.
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Now you see - that wouldn't make me go out out and buy a Nokia or a stick of Wrigley's gym. Similarly, seeing a Cadillac CTS on The Matrix wouldn't make me long for one even though it looks nice.
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On the flip side, I have a game called Driver 3. I'm sure those with PS2's will have heard of it but for those that haven't, it's a fairly realistic driving game. However, none of the cars are real. Sure - you can tell that one looks awfully close to a Mustang without quite being one and another looks distinctly similar to a Cadillac Seville but they're not real. However, "NOKIA" is plastered everywhere throughout the game. The main character has a Nokia phone - so detailed that you can even tell what model it is. The Bus Stops, billboards and posters dotted about the various cities all have "NOKIA" emblazoned on them too.
Usually, product placement works well - I personally dislike playing racing games which do not have real cars, but in the case of Driv3r they really shot themselves in the foot.
The Game was quite obviously set in the 1980's - not a single car was much newer than that and even the fast exotica were late 80's Lambo's and similar, given this seeing advertising for Nokia's latest mobile phone all over the game just... didn't work.
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More recently, the Playstation 2 game 'The Getaway' had one of the characters using a BT van to get to the next level of shooting and mayhem. BT ordered the game to be changed and I believe all newer versions of the game have a different van in them.
I noticed that of all the vehicles in The Getaway, the only one that wasn't an authentic model was the van, which was a thinly-disguised Transit. Presumably they didn't get permission from Ford to use their vehicles.
By the way, Will Smith's Audi in "I, Robot" was one designed specially for the film, called the RSQ.
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The one I've got is obviously a Tranny van. You can get the Hi-Cube, Initial City Link, Fed Ex and Royal Mail variants of them.
I wonder if that was another change that got made later on as I got one of the early ones.
Not a bad game but the handling of the cars was pretty poor.
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Wisdom; a commodity in painfully short supply at BMW I guess. Hawkeye ----------------------------- Stranger in a strange land
Oh i dunno, they got Bond into their Z3, Z8 and a 7 series. The Z3 was on screen for about a minute, but really helped launch the car.
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