Saturday, August 4, 2007

Product Placement

So, I'm watching 'On The Money' on CNBC yesterday (I had to see what happened that led to the stock market's big loss) and they introduce a segment (MSNBC Video) regarding the product placement ($40 mm of product placements) in the Bourne Ultimatum. I pause the DVR and try and think what products I can recall from the movie (I saw the movie earlier in the day):

VW - I clearly remember Bourne getting into a VW Golf (or something similiar)
Motorola - All cell phone shots were clearly Motorola phones
I didn't remember any other specific products being shown in the movie.

I then played the segment and it turns out that in addition to the little VW I saw one of the chases involved their newest Touareg. I clearly remember the chase scene and total destruction of the SVU but I the SVU itself (including brand) didn't stand out in any way).

Symantec also paid for their Norton products to be placed in the movie. I remember the scene and I got a big kick out of it. The Norton product somehow helps Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles)
get some top secret info from the CIA computer network. Nicky is doing her thing on her Notebook computer and a page pops up (1 second on screen) that is clearly Norton (coloring, layout, fonts, etc.). Thinking of any consumer Security software helping someone hack through CIA security is laughable, but Norton makes it even more ridiculous.

The CNBC piece also mentioned Barclay's Bank, which I didn't notice at all in the movie.

I'm not sure how effective these product placements are overall, but they didn't do it for me.

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