Ad nauseam
When Paul Mercurio danced atop a building in Strictly Ballroom, did one of your eyeballs twitch neurotically like a mad hatter’s at the sight of the giant neon Coca Cola sign behind him?
When Will Smith bragged about his “2004 Vintage” Converse sneakers, or parked his fancy Audi in I, Robot, did anyone wonder whether Asimov had in fact written the story as an exploration of 21st century brand recognition, and not a treatise on robotic logic versus human emotion?
Product placement has a colourful history in films – puke green in recent times – and in fact has existed for almost as long as the celluloid itself has been flickering. However, these pocket-liners didn’t really enter the public consciousness until the mid 80s when a big-headed alien showed a strong predilection for some Reese’s Pieces.
Since then we’ve discovered the McFlys love Pizza Hut, Bond gets his rocks off driving a BMW, Fed-Ex employees will get their parcels delivered even after ten years stranded on an island, and all the Transformers (actually only the good ones) transform into General Motors vehicles.
The ones that cinephiles don’t mind – and there are few – are the ads hard to notice. And generally speaking, filmmakers will perform adequately in this task, as they attempt to satisfy both Mr Corporate – who only wants to infiltrate your, uh, retail cortex and make you spend up – and you, the viewer, who wants an undiminished cinematic experience.
(I realise all kinds of arguments can be made at this point about directors’ integrity and vision and ability. Take Michael Bay, for example. Despite having earned himself and his company enough currency to shame Solomon, product placements are sometimes so prominent he almost deserves a nomination for sheer, balls-out courage. He can choreograph action scenes like few others, sure, but have you witnessed The Island? It may as well have been directed by Demtel’s Tim Shaw.)
Of course, the direction of technology and modern commerce suggested that this was inevitable, although a sense of anticipation provides little consolation here. Even in times BC (Before “Connection”), ads had become as much a part of our cityscape as the houses and roads built around them, and then the Internet got all big on us and just blew the floodgates right off their mechanical (pff!) 20th century hinges.
No longer did the use of a service or a product necessarily come at a financial cost to the user. Advertising itself became the business model. Use Facebook for free, read the New York Times without paying, watch your television shows online whenever you like. In this era of online news, music downloads and movie piracy, information is everywhere, easy, and thus, ‘free’.
Can a brother get a dollar? Well, yes, just shake hands with Lucifer and stick an ad on whatever you’re selling.
Google, the world’s most popular search engine (and most powerful entity since Oprah) has cornered this online advertising market, and is completely financed by it. No one is certain how exactly this came to pass, though.
For example, we know from extensive scientific research, that humans, all things being equal, will avert their attention from the television when it begins to shill engine oil or fast food or steam cleaning, lest the brain be sullied and rendered soft and mushy.
We’ve heard unverified accounts of Italian car drivers suffering temporary seizures as they hear advertisements broadcast on – oh God – Vatican Radio. The Vatican, one of the richest organisations in the world, apparently needs a larger collection plate. “God,” George Carlin once mused, “somehow just can’t handle his money.”
You might now be thinking to yourself how fortunate the literary world is, since, aside from the existence of tree-wasters like Dan Brown, books don’t suffer from similar intellectual compromises. There are great books, average books, and fuel for the fire place, all without ads. Right? Well, wrong.
Product placement has existed in trashy fiction since around 2001 – Fay Weldon’s “The Bulgari Connection” is an oft-cited example – but the lecherous monsters lurking behind the scenes have devised an even more insidious (but also unequivocally, unquestionably stupid) method to attempt entry into your wallets.
Online retailer and uber-librarian, Amazon, recently filed a patent on a means of advertising within print-on-demand books. (Print-on-demand is a growing industry whereby a consumer can have a sold-out book printed for them specifically.) What a shame, then, that despite owning in their files the wisdom of every great thinker that has ever existed, the good folks at Amazon still struggle to display a level of intelligence barely approaching that of Socrates after a few too many hemlocks.
Several regions of my brain are stinging as I consider the consequences of auto-generated, contextualised ads. Open a book on Epicurus to find advertisements for a local steakhouse, or a book by Nietzsche promoting anti-depressants, or heaven help us, an ad for Big Brother (the television show-cum-lobotomy-procedure) within the pages of 1984.
I’m not even going to start on texts containing anything remotely Marxist, anti-capitalist, or religious. You probably need no warning as to the earth-shattering, head-exploding ironies that will occur as a result of this patent. And for what? Amazon will already make money from the P.O.D service itself, so the ad revenue will just provide additional profit.
Dear readers, your narrator is nothing if not a poster child for technology’s inexorable onward march; a young, leftist, tech-loving geek who dreams of a future indistinguishable from today’s science fiction. Space travel! Hoverboards! Robot love! But even I must draw the line somewhere, and I’m drawing it with unbranded black charcoal, right between ads and libraries.
Give an inch to anyone in marketing, and I guarantee they’ll take a mile and then proceed to cover the whole thing in ads, catalogues, specials, sales figures, and samplers. One day it’s books, and who knows what’s next? Menswear ads in your late father’s funeral programme? Evian product placement at your daughter’s baptism?
“Our water is so pure…”