The swift rise of the headphone brand ‘Beats by Dre’ has been amazing. The brand has appeared in an incredible amount of music videos and films and it appears that this strategy has paid off. Besides the heavy product placement, the brand has followed a luxury brand route, charging really high prices for their products.

I have stumbled upon this excellent website which identifies any brands which appear in movies. It also contains links to other articles and videos which discuss product placement.

http://www.brandhype.org/MovieMapper/index.jsp

Mar 27 2011

Is Product Placement Running Wild?

Recently, paid product has been allowed on UK TV after a long standing opposition to such covert advertising. It will be interesting to see the extent of the influence of advertisers on the programme content – will creativity be discouraged?

Documentary maker, Morgan Spurlock’s recent Sundance Festival hit The Greatest Movie Ever Sold presents a critique of this form of advertising – ironically he secured 15 paid product placement deals for the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJvl5JTuKV8

Despite its critics, product placement remains one of the remaining viable options for advertisers as traditional TV ads are being avoided thanks to websites such as Tivo and products such as Skybox.

Brandchannel.com rates Apple the most successful product placement brand, noting that its products featured in 10 of the 33 number one box-office movies in the US that year. The film with the most placements was Iron Man 2, which notched an incredible 64.