Product Placement has very much become the bane of my existence. In the last 10 years or so, I don’t think I’ve been able to take in any media that wasn’t overrun with a poorly done marketing insert or a lazily displayed artifact of our culture.

Who hasn’t seen that ridiculous moment in a movie when the handsome lead actor and the sexy, yet quirky, lead actress come in for their first kiss while carefully holding up a diet coke to fulfill their sponsorship contract? or the high speed chase that puts our hero in the newest Volvo running through a nondescript cityscape plastered with Vitamin Water ads wearing Button-fly 501 Jeans, tags full intact?

Product Placement, or embedded marketing, can be a powerful tool for any brand when done correctly. The problem I have is when the product is completely off base with the marketing method, or when it’s so overused that it goes from being an addition to a medium to being the subject.

Examples of odd/bad/over-the-top product placement:

• A character mentions the product when it has nothing to do with a scene. For instance, I was watching a drama on television the other day and the lead character says something truly asinine like, “Hey man, can you get me a Diet Coke with Lime when you get back?” This had no significance to the story. The character wasn’t trying to lose weight, so the diet part wasn’t relevant. There was no action leading to this which showed the character as thirsty, for that matter. There was nothing to gain from this action. It was truly a matter of, “Lets disrupt this scene with unnecessary product placement.”
• Badly misplaced equipment. For instance, there was a film where several computers were used in the movie. Every computer had this glowing Apple symbol shown proudly. Instead of saying, “I’m using this computer” or “we need to find a computer”, the characters stumbled over “This iBook will get us what we need” and “Hop on that iMac and break into this system.” It was so forced and unnatural that it killed the whole scene for me.
• I saw an advertisement for a restaurant that was opening in a new mall. A celebrity was there to kick off the restaurant. One of their other contracts was for Reebok, so they were dressed foot to hat in reebok gear, thus killing two birds in one stone. I wasn’t sure if I was seeing an advertisment for Reebok, or this restaurant.

For more examples of both positive and negative product placement, see the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement

So what’s to be learned from this? Product Placement can be a good thing, but it has to be tastefully done and can’t be overdone. Proper embedded marketing is just that.. embedded. It’s hidden in plain sight. It’s obvious, but not overdone. It’s there to remind us, not to overpower us. It’s the subtlety of these messages that remind us to consume, while the over zealous of these only remind us how corporations can ruin even the most benign of activities.