Notes
Some Snippets About Product Placement
Apple doesn’t pay for product placement.
On Meg Ryan using a PowerBook in You’ve Got Mail:
“Our arrangement was simply a loaning of equipment in exchange for exposure in the hands of Meg Ryan,” said Suzanne Forlenza, manager of product placement for Apple.
That’s the same Suzanne Forlenza who’s been in charge of product placement since 1994. There’s a nice old profile on her and her efforts from apple.com (ca. 1999) here:
And then she had her first big hit. “With Forrest Gump, there was no product, just the Apple logo,” Forlenza recalls. “They called up and said, ‘We have a kind of wacky idea — what do you think?’ They wanted to use our letterhead for the part where Forrest Gump finds out he’s become a millionaire because he’s invested in what he thought was a fruit company.” Paramount used the Apple letterhead, and 78,873,439 people saw it.
Moving away from Apple…
Futurepedia (the BTTF wiki, duh):
The product placement department had made a deal with the California Raisin Board, accepting $50,000 to place a reference to raisins in the film. Since raisins do not photograph well, the placement was on a bench upon which Red the Bum was seen sleeping when Marty returned from 1955. “When the California Raisin Board saw it,” recounted [co-writer Bob] Gale, “they were livid,” and the money was refunded.
Total number of pairs of Wayfarers that had been sold prior to the 1983 Risky Business product placement in 1983: 18,000.
Number of pairs of Wayfarers sold in 1986: 1.5 million.
[Crazy Taxi] featured a whole load of national chain stores, such as Tower Records, KFC, Fila, and Pizza Hut. The advertising made the city feel realistic and definitely enhanced the gameplay. […] The advertising was totally in keeping with the game, and because there was such a variety, it never really felt like you were watching an advertisement.
