Tagged : Product Placement

in Media Culture

Gossip Girl Pumps Verizon

Gossip Girl is an endless fountain of product placement, but the one consumer product on the show that always interests me most is the mobile phones that the characters use. Surely on a show where the whole premise centers around a Facebook-esque website accessed via cel phone, the provider of choice must pay top dollar for screen time.

There is no doubt in my mind that there are many thousands of Serena Van Der Woodsen wannabes out there looking to be like the TV show character adopting everything from her pouty demeanor to her fashion to her cel phone.

For season 4 on Gossip Girl the characters have aligned themselves with Verizon. If you notice, none of them use an iPhone, and the cool phone of choice is actually a Motorola Droid X smart phone powered by Google’s Android platform. I guess the iPhone 4 is already passe on the Upper East Side.

Most of the characters seem to carry one of Verizon’s line-up of smart phones, with the exception of Lonely Boy Dan Humphrey, who being from Brooklyn can only afford a rather plain LG flip phone despite his dad’s marrying into money.

I’ll be curious to see if next season the cool kids will have migrated to Sprint’s 4G network, after all, it’s the fastest network going and they have the HTC Evo.

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Blatant Bing Product Placement Continues

The blatant product placement on Gossip Girl continues as Microsoft continues to bash the American pre-teen audience over the head with its Bing browser.

The Bing Browser has been featured in several episodes of the Upper East Side Manhattan text messaging driven melodrama. In one episode a horribly uncool and relatively old Eleanor Waldorf exclaims “just Bing it” in a bout of frustration. In season 3 episode 20 Jenny Humphrey, aka “Little J” uses the Bing browser to foreshadow a pivotal plot point.

Gossip Girl is a show known for its product placement. In another episode I recall someone buying a Vitamin Water off a giant stack on a counter at a chic coffee bar. Do you think brands are pushing too hard by featuring their products on shows like Gossip Girl, or is it just par for the course?

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24 Sprint Product Placement

Last night’s seat-gripping, nail-biting episode of 24 (season 8 episode 21) had me glued to the TV until Chloe O’Brien, played by Mary Lynn Rajskub, decided she needed to drop some product placement for Sprint into the scene. It was almost as bad as the Jack Bauer Hyundai incident.

Literally, the whole day would have been blown, and Jack Bauer would be dead if it weren’t for the Sprint Overdrive 4G Mobile Hotspot technology that saved the day. In an episode where they quoted the US/UK military communications intercept network ECHELON, it is ironic that Sprint’s consumer level 3G mobile internet device would save the day.

Later in the episode Jack Bauer performs a rudimentary surgery to remove a Sprint SIM card from the Russian agent Pavel Tokarev’s innards. After a quick wipe to remove any guts and stomach acid, the card is inserted into a Spint enabled HTC smart phone and low and behold it works!

Despite my groaning, this is why I love 24. Call it MacGyver for the tech generation.

in Media Culture

Bing Search on Gossip Girl

Microsoft is pushing its newly revamped search engine, Bing, quite hard these days. Almost a little too hard.

I’ve noticed on the last few episodes of Gossip Girl that the characters have been using Bing as their main search engine. At first it was subtle, just a screen insert shot here or there of a character using Bing, but in the last episode (season 3 episode 18 “The Unblairable Lightness of Being”) Blair Waldorf’s mother Eleanor exclaims in a bout of computer filled search frustration —”Just Bing it.”

Clearly this move by Bing is a direct jab at Google and an attempt to turn the word Bing into a verb as Google did by adding its name to the cultural lexicon.

Judging even by search stats for this site, Bing will have a long way to go as even watchers of Gossip Girl are a very media and advertising aware bunch. Such overt and blatant attempts at marketing via character borne product placement may not be the best approach, but we shall see in time.

Do you think Bing has what it takes to take down the Google Goliath?

in Media Culture

Hyundai Genesis on 24

If Jack Bauer can kick ass in a Hyundai Genesis Coupe maybe you could too?

I’m guessing that’s what the folks at Hyundai are hoping after Kiefer Sutherland, uh sorry, Jack Bauer steals and takes to the wheel of a slick looking Hyundai in the recent 24 season 8 episode 15.

The episode must have cost Hyundai a fortune in product placement dollars as Jack Bauer power slides his way through the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is probably one of the longest car chase scenes on 24 ever with lots of car maneuvering action, tachometer rev shots, and cool power sliding of course.

So does product placement work? I think over the course of time it will. The car looked pretty awesome on the show, and every young man wants to be Jack Bauer, so it has potential.

I think the reason it may work in this case is because the new Hyundai Coupe actually looks like a great product. If Jack had got behind the wheel of a 1986 Hyundai Pony or even a later model Sonata I doubt the reaction would be the same.

I saw the Genesis Coupe at a shopping mall display recently and had to do a double take when upon closer inspection I discovered it was a Hyundai. The Korean car manufacturer has come a long way in terms of beating its beater roots into the ground. Twice now a Motor Trend Car of the Year, Hyundai is further building its reputation by associating itself with Americana programming like 24.

In season 7 of 24 Morris, Chloe’s beleaguered computer programming husband, drives a Genesis sedan with loads of bells and whistles which was a marked departure from previous seasons where the only picture cars seemed to be either Ford, Toyota, or Lexus. It was always funny how Jack Bauer would start out in a Ford Expedition SUV, destroy it, and then somehow manage to find another more-or-less identical Ford SUV.

The other contracts must be up because Jack sure made a splash for Hyundai last night ripping up the streets of New York in a compact sports car. It’s a shame that this is the last season. I would like to have seen some Casino Royale-esque car product placement in 24, but perhaps Jack will stumble on another Hyundai Coupe in one of the remaining episodes.

Do you think that the use of auto product placement in the show is a distraction, and would you be more or less inclined to buy a Hyundai now that Jack Bauer has driven one?

Other reading:

Brandweek.com

CarBuyersNotebook.com