I watched the 2012 horror movie The Possession last night, and at the end, some guy is driving
along in his BMW when he gets into a fatal accident with a truck. (Oh, um,
Spoiler Alert, I guess.) And I thought: “Oh, that must be product placement for
BMW!” (I am, of course, kidding.)
But you know, maybe a competing car company paid the
production to show someone being killed in a BMW, like maybe Volvo or Mercedes
or someone like that? And I think this idea is quite possibly the future of
product placement: negative, attack product placement! People don’t care if
they see a product in a movie: we see brands all the time in real life, so
we’re already desensitized to it. But if we see a specific brand of product harm or kill someone in a movie, well, we might
just remember that!
And in The Possession,
the guy gets hit by the truck, and his car flips over, and then the camera cuts
to an angle of the wreck that shows the guy upside-down in the car dead, and
the camera slowly zooms out to show that the haunted box that the movie is
about has ejected from the car and is undamaged and just waiting for the next
person to come along and find it. But right next to this box is the hood of the
BMW, and it’s facing the camera to show that double rounded-cornered rectangle
logo that’s on the front grille of every BMW, which reminds us that this wasn’t
just a car this heroic character died in: it was The Ultimate Driving Machine.
But this type of negative, attack product placement would have
to have a non-disclosure agreement to really work properly. Because if people
found out it was all arranged to make a specific brand look bad, people might
not be turned off to the brand, and they might just feel hostility toward the
brand that paid to smear their competitor. So it would have to be all secret,
cash under the table, illicit advertising deals. And if anyone asks, the movie
people will have to swear they will just claim to have picked the product at
random when it harms or kills characters in the movie; like, for instance, if a
bar fight leads to someone’s death when they are hit over the head with a
bottle of (whatever brand of) beer.
