Blog #6: Korova Milkbar

This weekend, I had the unique opportunity to view a "viddy" of the old age. Until this blog topic helped me realize that product placement is a relatively new concept (since the early eighties), I figured it was just a part of movie making. I thought movie making relied on this advertisement funding to help better their sets. As I discovered, movies apparently were made without product placement and thrived...

As teenagers, our counter-cultural (not counter-culture, for some of us do believe in work and war) bias and attitudes tend to align themselves with my generation's abhorrance and ridicule of product placement. (I mention counter-cultural because as noted in an advertising documentary where teens were told to define "cool," teenagers will abhor the idea of proclaiming or even defining/labeling "cool"--it is more of an elusive force that one is either a part of or apart from it. This counter-cultural idea suggests that no matter what the masses suggest is a good product, through advertising, teenagers will counter those examples and find a new trendy "cool".)

As if advertising is trying to play a game of hide-and-seek with teenagers, ads must become disguised and readily hidden if a teenager is going to buy into it. Literally. If an ad agency makes a product as clear as an azure sky of deepest summer, a teenager is going to cry foul and revolt (as the hippies once did) against the masses of corporate ads.

In the years before product placement, simple scenes such as a bartender pouring a beer would have clear glasses without brand names on the beer or other drinks. Clothes were generally more bland, particularly in favor of stripes or more "dressed-up" apparel. No one ever criticized a show for making product placement on the account that it just did not exist.

Today, product placement is an insidious droog that, if not subtle, will have the negative effect on teenagers. A classic example of product placement that was used for satire was the scene in Wayne's World. This comic suggestion of advertisements puts the movie on the side of the viewers, as if the movie were saying "We disagree with product placement in our movies, and we agree with YOU, the viewer!" This subtle yet obvious "alliance" with viewers, predominantly teenagers, only engrains the product further into one's gulliver.