STEALTH MARKETING:A new film highlights the not-so-subtle tactics of product placement - but is itself complicit in this corrosive practice, writes DAVIN O'DWYER
THE WORLD OF advertising has a long and storied history, but you don't need to watch Mad Mento realise how much things have changed in the image-selling industry. While the conventional advertisement, whether on television, radio or in print, has become a minor kind of art form over the years – and an underappreciated element of popular culture – it has been joined by a far more insidious variation, product placement, that most surreptitious form of commercial propaganda.
A new film starring Demi Moore and David Duchovny, The Joneses, features an ingenious high concept that attempts to satirise the practice. A nuclear family move into a salubrious US suburban neighbourhood, but their perfection isn't limited to their pearly smiles and strong family values – this wholesome foursome also boast the latest gear and greatest gadgets that money can buy. A small fleet of Audi cars sits in front of their expensively decorated McMansion. They all use HTC phones to make adoring video calls. They wear labels from next season's collections, while a fridge full of the finest branded cuisine sates their appetites. If material success is the American dream, the Joneses are in American heaven, and their neighbours can't keep up with them fast enough.
But it doesn’t take long for us to realise that all is not as it seems in Consumerville. The Joneses are a fiction, an undercover cell, the creation of a stealth-marketing company that plants Alpha families among the affluent and impressionable in order to boost brand awareness for their target demographics.
The Jonesesis perfectly placed to skewer the world of "contextual advertising", but it's hard to bite the hand that feeds, particularly when the hand is wearing such a luxurious and stylish glove (available from Lacoste stockists nationwide). It is impossible to satirise product placement while being complicit in it, and as a result, the world of the Joneses, one of relentless consumerism, isn't criticised in any meaningful way – getting into debt to fuel consumption is shown to be a bad thing, granted, but the essential hollowness of materialism isn't examined. When Duchovny's character has his obligatory epiphany, it is about living a lie, not the fact that promoting luxury products as key ingredient for successful living is inherently dishonest.
To follow the logic of writer-director Derrick Borte's movie, having all these shiny and expensive things can actually make you happy, but living a lie to attain them is the problem. As a philosophy, that stinks worse than a fake bottle of Demi Moore perfume. Enjoyable enough as it is, few films have been so obviously compromised by commercial obligations as The Joneses, which is perhaps fitting evidence of the corrosive nature of product placement.
But how have we come to the point where we spend a good chunk of every movie being bombarded by logos and brands? Any history of product placement must give a special mention to Steven Spielberg, who got the ball rolling in a big way with the prominence he gave Reese's Pieces candy in the otherwise perfect ET. Did kids come out of that movie wanting an extraterrestrial buddy? Of course. What did they get? The alien's favourite candy instead. But Spielberg wasn't done turning his films into moving product catalogues, with plenty of brand names awkwardly shoehorned into the Jurassic Parkfilms, while an entire scene in Minority Reportwas devoted to showing us advertisements from the future – oddly, there are no new brands between now and the time of thought police and floating cars.
Indeed, product placement in movies is almost a talking point now, obviating the need to be discrete about it. Part of the pre-release hype before every James Bond movie revolves around which brands are included. It is almost as big a part of the publicity machine as the choice of Bond girl. Of course, Ian Fleming littered the Bond novels with brand names, too, although that was his literary style rather than a money-making enterprise – unlike Fay Weldon, who famously received money from some high-end jeweller I can't think of right now when she published The Bulgari Connectionin 2001.
While it is still rare in literature, product placement is becoming endemic in music videos, with Lady Gaga's Telephonevideo the most brazen ad on MTV. Lady Gaga, it hardly need be pointed out, appears to exist as an invention of these very marketing forces, a commercial Frankenstein at perennial risk of rampaging out of control, exhausted logos scattered in her wake.
One marketing creation who has already spun out of control is Tiger Woods, coincidentally, the subject of a rather apposite joke in The Joneses. Not unlike the Jones family, Woods's entire life has been exposed as a carefully calibrated sham, a wafer-thin front for his shilling of golf clubs and sports clothes and luxury watches and energy drinks and razor blades. His public personality was one vast contrived product placement. The artifice, and his libido, have destroyed him, and no matter how many more majors he wins, he will always be remembered for his downfall rather than his golf.
The whole propaganda overtones of modern product placement and engineered marketing personas smacks of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, who used psychoanalytical theories to legendary effect in manipulating public opinion and product promotion. For his efforts, he became known as the father of public relations – a hellish epithet if ever there was one – but his pioneering work, which played on the easily swayed subconscious and the contagious nature of public opinion, is still with us. Every time we see, say, an Apple computer or a BMW car in a film or TV show, the estate of Edward Bernays should get a penny.
To see a true parody of our brand-saturated world, and by extension the work of PR gurus and advertising mavens, you must turn to this year’s Oscar-winning animated short, Logorama, which depicts a world literally defined by product placement. The film imagines a city composed entirely of logos, with Michelin Men police chasing an outlaw Ronald McDonald. Finally, the city is rent asunder in a giant cataclysm, leaving the iconic trademarks and brands drifting in the sea – a powerful vision of consumerism consuming itself. If we keep ignoring the compromising effects of stealth marketing, our fate might not be that different.
