When Brands Become The Story
In the waning days of TV's golden era, where will we draw the line on product placement and integration?
The third season of Emily in Paris debuted late last year, and the show’s stunning premise—What if a twentysomething studied abroad but, like, forever?—has made it essential viewing for those looking for a respite in these stormy times.
A quick synopsis of the show: Emily, a girl boss who made 2010s hustle culture her personality, moves to Paris to work with a French marketing agency. For better or worse, each episode feels like it could be the next or the last: Emily suggests an idea for a brand, executives dismiss it but eventually love it, Emily falls in or out of love with someone, the credits roll, and the next episode plays.
“It is best to think of the entire exercise of Emily in Paris as a sort of collective hallucination that we are all having together,” Vulture’s Jessica M. Goldstein wrote at the beginning of the new season. Completely agreed.
About four minutes into the season’s first episode, that hallucination becomes apparent. Emily gets a call from her Chicago-based ex (for what it’s worth, we haven’t heard from him since season one), but he’s not here to waste time rekindling a lost love. It’s business, baby!
The gist: Emily, I work for McDonald’s now. And guess what? They’re looking for a French marketing firm to market the *drumroll, please* McBaguette. Wait—was it you who told me that you work for a French marketing firm? Woah! I’ll set up a time for you to seal the deal with my boss. By the way, he’ll be in Paris in 14 hours.
The McBaguette—it’s funny! (for more on corporate breading, see: Panera’s BAGuette). Even for the fever dream that is Emily in Paris, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that this could very well be a gag, a tongue-in-cheek dig at, I don’t know, Americans having shitty taste in food, Americans having a shitty grasp of other languages, American corporations co-opting foreign culture with a washed-down, scalable shitty version of it, et al.
It’s gotta be something like that, right?
Right?
RIGHT?
Minutes later in this McDonald’s marathon, one of Emily’s many love interests suggests they both head to grab lunch at *drumroll but like you already know what’s coming*:
Fast-forward to the end of the episode (it doesn’t matter what happens), and Emily is finally sitting down to dinner on top of the (you guessed it) Eiffel Tower. The Boss of the Associate Manager of Global Partnerships at McDonald’s turns out to be easily impressed and, well, this entire pitch Emily put together? He’s lovin’ it.
Some other nonsense rounds out the episode (someone’s water breaks—it doesn’t matter whose, OKAY?!), and the episode comes to an end just before the next begins.
As I briefly come out of this binging fugue state, it hits me: nearly everything in this entire episode has been a whole series of product placements and integrations for a marketing activation!
My hunch, confirmed by The Drum, left me feeling more upset and stupid than usual after watching hours of TV. How could they? I wonder. How could Netflix, the company whose content I, on the whole, generally think is OK and whose content I’ve never sat through a commercial for, and furthermore, have never paid for—oh, OK, I think I get it.
“When ratings drop, ad rates drop, too, and when people fast-forward producers look for new forms of access: through apps, through data mining, through deals that shape the shows we see, both visibly and invisibly,” wrote The New Yorker’s former (and fantastic) TV critic, Emily Nussbaum, in 2015. “Some of this involves the ancient art of product integration, by which sponsors buy the right to be part of the story: these are the ads that can’t be fast-forwarded.”
For advertisers in the pursuit of making make every ad dollar more efficient, commercials are effective—but they’re not effective enough. Why risk throwing money at people who could just leave the room when you’re trying to talk to them?
In an effort to keep up in a hyper-commodified world, TV is making better the very thing it was built on: advertising. When—if at all—will it become too much?
Hi. For a brief moment, I want to distinguish the difference between how I define product placement, and product/brand integration.
Product placement = a product displayed in a scene; it is merely an object. For example, a pair of Nike Air Max 90s are displayed on a bench in a locker room scene.
Product/brand integration = a product that plays a role in a scene; at some point, it is a/the subject of the scene. For example, in a locker room scene, a man compliments a fellow man on his shoes: “Sick kicks! Are those the Nike Air Max 90s, MSRP for $140 online and at participating retailers? Heard women like those a lot.”
Sometimes when people talk about the former, they’re talking about the latter, and vice-versa. Okay, onward.
Recently, I got in touch with a Latvian man named Sergejs Kamolins, who runs an aptly named blog about product placement: Product Placement Blog. Eight years ago, as a hobby, Kamolins began taking screenshots of products he saw on TV and in movies and started posting them to the blog.
The website still has a bare-bones blog aesthetic, but it’s highly effective. Search some of the most notable TV or movies, or items like signs, sneakers, or sunglasses, and you’ll get served a long list of screenshots of those instances.
Some recent examples: Caymus Vineyards in The Last of Us, SimpliSafe in Your Place or Mine, and BMW in You People.
Fast-forward a few years later and today, Product Placement Blog—now equipped with a few algorithms that Kamolins built that allow him to scrape hundreds of TV shows and movies as they come out—has accumulated some 80,000 instances of product placement.
That seems like a lot. Just because a product is featured in a scene doesn’t mean it’s necessarily product placement, right? I ask. What are the“organic” vs. “fake” instances of product placement in these made-up worlds?
Kamolins says that “organic product placement”—where a show or movie would purposefully showcase a product without some type of formal agreement with the company in question—might be the case. But probably not; in many cases, Kamolins says, studios and brands have reached out to him to confirm their participation in product placement.
If productions can cut down on the costs on set by implementing paid-for props, especially those that don’t alter the creative direction of a scene or show, product placement seems like a no-brainer. If TV and movies want to mimic the real world, they must make it real by including what’s so pervasively omniscient in our lives: advertising.
But it’s when companies actually start paying productions—in some cases, very, very well—that things start to get murky. And, yes, when companies are paying, people take notice.
For a man who has seen a lot of it, Kamolins says most product placement feels authentic. If you see a character digging through a bag of Doritos on the couch, it might remind you of the times you dug through a bag of Doritos on the couch.
And if that means on some subconscious level that the next time you’re in the grocery store and you buy a bag of Doritos, cool. You get Doritos dust on everything you own, Doritos makes a few bucks and, for the most part, no harm, no foul.
To get the perspective of the agencies that represent the advertisers that get their products into shows and movies, I reached out to FTWK Agency, a product placement and brand integration firm based in Toronto.
Canadian Daniel Birnberg, a product placement account director at FTWK, has a very straightforward goal: identify favorable opportunities for the company’s client roster—including the likes of Kellogg’s, Mazda, and Square—and get them on TV.
For example, not too long ago, a production clearance coordinator sent Birnberg a script for an episode of Netflix’s The Recruit. One of the scenes of the show featured cereal boxes, and this coordinator knew Birnberg had a relationship with Kellogg’s. Could he send her over some product?
He could and he did. Then, Frosted Flakes and Rice Krispies became a part of the show.
It’s important to note here that the dialogue from this scene actually dropped the titular characters from Rice Krispies’ box—Snap, Crackle, and Pop—a reference that, according to Birnberg, was written into the script after the product became a part of it. Undoubtedly, this was a huge win for Kellogg’s.
To Birnberg, examples like this are ones viewers don’t mind watching. “The name of the game for product placement is showing up in a very organic, you know, real-life fashion,” Birnberg said. “And I think if it feels too forced, or as though you’re being sold to, or that there was like a ton of decisions for this placement to be perfectly showcased, then it rubs viewers the wrong way.”
When products are placed too prominently, people catch on to the marketing ploy, according to research from Beth L. Fossen, an assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University, and David A. Schweidel, a professor of marketing at Emory University. But on the flip side, viewers are influenced by verbal product placement, or when a character says the product but it is not shown.
Even though it’s shown to be more effective, would advertisers really opt for giving up screen time? Even if it meant not alienating the very audiences they’re after? No. Absolutely not. That’s called radio, buddy.
So, in response, entertainment gets creative.
One of the most compelling tactics by creatives in the modern era is irony. Writers and performers, empathizing with viewers who disapprove of product placement just as much as they, do exactly what an advertiser wants: put the brand front and center and showcase it in a way that makes it feel unnaturally prominent. Repeated, this waggish bit becomes awkward to the point where it eventually becomes funny, a self-own to the brands who thought they could buy our attention.
Which, no matter how you spin it, is still the case. “To my mind, the cleverer the integration, the more harmful it is,” Nussbaum writes. “It’s a sedative designed to make viewers feel that there’s nothing to be angry about, to admire the ad inside the story, to train us to shrug off every compromise as necessary and normal.”
As a concession to audiences, streamers could note if product placement happens during a show. But that rarely happens (Disney+ rolled out the disclaimer for some shows, but did not note which ones).
But frankly, disclaimers or big flashing warnings on the screen may not do much. Product placement and integration have gotten to a point where we don’t really mind it; as a result, the floodgates are open for more innovative and creative methods. Advertisers, seeking a more definitive means of return on investment, and streamers, doing everything they can to keep those advertisers coming back, are sensing that the true value of product placement and integration is still untapped.
In the past year, Amazon and Freevee launched virtual product placements (VPPs) and Peacock launched In-Scene Ads. Whatever you call it, the technology allows the streamers to alter and make previously-static elements dynamic. For instance, a billboard could change to feature a rotating advertisement. A TV—within the TV you’re currently watching!—could play a commercial. Imagine if the trademark paraphernalia on Michael Scott’s desk included a bottle of Core Hydration, or Sam Malone cracked open a Cutwater for Norm.
But the quest for more advertiser value won’t cease. Maybe we’re not too far from the day when we’ll be forced to scream exactly what we’re being sold.
About midway through the third season of Emily in Paris, Emily and another love interest, Alfie, travel to the French countryside to stay at a charming chateau. Don’t worry—Emily isn’t flexing that much-needed PTO! The fields of the estate abound in fresh purple lavender, an idyllic setting in Emily’s mind not for afternoon strolls but, of course, a dinner to fête the McLaren Artura, the brand’s new hybrid sports car.
Netflix has not confirmed this as an instance of product integration—why would you if you don’t have to?—but it doesn’t take too much to read between the lines.
For all the flak that Emily gets, we must remember one thing: Emily can market anything she desires. In this three-season fantasy world, this is her superpower, and with it comes social media stardom, absurd situations, and steady travel. We, as the audience, bask in this because Emily is escapism at its most clichéd, a distraction that doesn’t need to be paused and resumed. If you space out, it’ll still be there to welcome you back whenever you’re ready.
If a product gets integrated here or a few products get placed there, will you really notice?
The answer is, hopefully, yes. Emily’s superpower exists solely in the EIP Universe; it is non-transferable. When she leaves her unbelievable life to temporarily sell in ours, her superpower feels like a gross overextension and misuse of her role. It’s as if Batman fucked up my roof by driving all over it. In these instances, Emily fails to serve us in this weird world she’s invited us to and instead becomes a vehicle for advertisers who are using her world to sell to ours.
And, like a 30-second ad spot, Emily becomes disposable, a transaction that stains the fabric of the show forever. On the other hand, McDonald’s and McLaren walk away unscathed, ready for the next plug that makes fiscal sense.
For shows like Emily, the bar may feel low (though let’s not forget the show was a 2021 Emmy nominee for Outstanding Comedy Series). But for the shows that shape our collective consciousness, comment on our cultural strife and, hell, are just there to give us a few good, easy laughs, the stakes should be higher — for the audiences and for the people who make them.
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Like how you organized this post. It’s very well thought out. And I totally agree, product placement is moving into a new and very strange realm. Great work!
Really cool take!