I am aware that marketing within movies and on tv shows, or "product placement" as it more is commonly known in the industry, has been around since ... well, since before I was born. This movie lifts the lid to show just how movies and television series are made and sold, and what that potentially means for directors, actors, companies, and ultimately for the movie-going and tv-watching public, aka. people like you and me.
Morgan Spurlock cold calls companies to be part of his documentary (mostly with a resounding No response), he talks with advertising executives, he talks to marketing companies, he pitches to companies. Along the way, he demonstrates just how much the movie industry and the advertising are in cahoots - the adage of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" is ever present.
He interviewed a wide range of people along the way, including Ralph Nader (consumer advocate), Noam Chomsky (Professor Emeritus of Linguistics), Martin Lindstrom (author of Buyology), Susan Linn (author of Consuming kids : the hostile takeover of childhood), Quentin Tarantino (director), and J. J. Abrams (director), which shows an interesting divide between non-industry & industry perspectives on the power of advertising & marketing companies in the film & television environment.
This movie certainly made me laugh at times - at the ridiculousness of why some companies turned down the opportunity, at the language used in legal contracts, at how some companies spent most of their annual marketing budget to be in the movie - and it made me curious to check out some of the companies that were an integral part of the movie (POM Wonderful is now on my list of drinks to try - the marketing obviously worked on me).
Most of all though, it made me want to watch a Hollywood blockbuster and count the number of times I could spot a deliberate product placement.
