Top 5 Shameless Cell Phone Product Placements
Nobody watches commercials anymore. If they aren’t fastforwarding through the ads on their TiVo then their fiddling with their phones or wandering off to the kitchen to find a snack during commercial breaks. Solution: product placement. From the classic integration of Reese’s Pieces into E.T. to the self-aware selling out to Pizza Hut and Pepsi on Wayne’s World, we as consumers are no strangers to product placement. For the most part, we’re fine with it, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the natural flow of the story. But sometimes, it does. And when product placement gets so aggressive it jars us out of the storyline and the invented world that we inhabit in order to escape the drudgery of everyday life, that’s when it becomes shameless. Here, we’ve rounded up a few such instances when product pushers cross the line.
5. Star Trek and Nokia
Sci-Fi films are always ripe for product placement – especially when it comes to techie gadgets. The message conveyed in this Star Trek shill: in the future, all the cool kids will have Nokia smartphones embedded into the dashboard of their Corvette.
Engadget
It’s not quite on par with the cringe-inducing comment from Will Smith from iRobot, where he lovingly endorses his “vintage 2004″ Converse kicks. But the notion that Nokia cell phones are the “smartphones of the future – today!” is a bit presumptuous.
4. Jon Stewart’s iPhone at the Oscars
Jon Stewart takes a moment out of his Oscar hosting in 2008 to marvel at the widescreen multimedia features on his iPhone. It’s arguable whether he was paid for this gag or if he was simply making a joke about the hyperconnectedness and our over-mediated society. Keep in mind that this is the same man who did a segment on the iFart application on his fake news show.
3. Sprint and Heroes (and we don’t mean the HTC Hero)
If anyone was going to litter scenes from Heroes with phones, it ought to be Sprint, the purveyors of the HTC Hero right? The full episodes aired on NBC have their fair share of phone placements, but the “check out this phone” shots really get out of hand in the webisodes. For example, each plot point of “Slow Burn,” which fleshes out the backstory of Lydia, somehow revolves around a Sprint phone (spoilers ahead):
- Edgar busts in on Lydia, who is considering using a forbidden Sprint phone to call her daughter she’s left behind.
- Lydia and her daughter have an in-network phone conversation on their Sprint phones
- Lydia and her daughter exchange photos via MMS that they took with their 5-megapixel cameras
- Lydia pulls up Google maps to show Edgar where her daughter lives
- But before Edgar can go pick her up, the daughter shows up where Lydia is hiding. “How did you find me?” “Your picture was geotagged – it was no problem!”
- After a fight with her daughter, Lydia wistfully swipes through a photo album using the Sprint phone’s intuitive touch screen
- The leader of a group of superheroes thumbs through the high tech features of the Sprint phone, which he has confiscated from Lydia’s daughter, and comments how such “trappings” of the modern world are strictly forbidden, though this one has amazingly reunited a mother and daughter
- Edgar runs away in shame, leaving a heartfelt farewell letter – via text message on Lydia’s smartphone.
With each webisode clocking in at about a minute and a half, there’s just about as much screen time for the Sprint smartphone as there are for the main characters. Now, there’s nothing wrong with helping bankroll a quality show by arranging for a Pepsi can to appear on the kitchen counter now and then. But to completely construct a mini-series around a phone and give some bit roles to its human co-stars, well, that’s just shameless.
2. 30 Rock – Can We Have Our Money Now?
30 Rock’s Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin now famous shill for Verizon Wireles phones begins with the characters discussing Verizon Wireless phones (Jack: “These Verizon Wireless phones are so popular I accidentally grabbed one belonging to an acquaintance.” Liz: “Well, sure, because that Verizon Wireless service is just unbeatable. If I saw a phone like that on TV I’d be like ‘Where’s my nearest retailer so I can, get one!?”) and then busting down the fourth wall by turning to the camera and asking “Can we have our money now?” True, the stunt was done for a laugh and some hard-hitting commentary on the state of product placement in TV shows and movies today, but still – NBC probably did get quite a hefty load of money from Verizon and Verizon probably did get the exposure they wanted (even more, thanks to the spot going viral).
30 Rock does other quite ads for cell phone companies, including the iPhone, which consistently shows up in the episode “Generalissimo” touting its neato camera feature.
1. Samsung Instinct: No Guns, No Romance, No Plot – Just Phone
Sprint redeems itself after its obvious “product integration” transgressions with this series of movie trailer spoofs promoting the Samsung Instinct. The first trailer is a Hollywood-style action/thriller with lines like, “Why stop at a call? Why don’t you send an email or a text message? Or update your Facebook status?” and “It’s DOA for you …not LOL.” Another lampoon of horror flicks shows the killer using Samsung’s voice navigation feature to track down his victims (”How does he keep finding us?”). These aren’t available on the original teaser sites anymore, but you can certainly find them on YouTube.
Seen an obvious product placement on the tube or the big screen? Tell us about in the comments.
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