Product placement in movies got weird this year
Product placement needs to be obvious enough so we notice the brand without being so conspicuous that it takes us out of the story. In 2025, product placement reached new levels of absurdity.
Imagine working for the Department of Homeland Security the day machines from outer space invade the planet, discovering you could deactivate these alien-machines with a bespoke computer virus, only to realise that you don’t have the requisite $19.99 memory stick! Not to worry, as long as your future son-in-law happens to be an Amazon employee. He can send you one using Prime Air, Amazon’s new drone service. “It’s the future of delivery!”
You may recognise this comical bit of product placement from War of the Worlds, an intergalactically-panned film released earlier this year, available to watch now on, you guessed it, Amazon Prime. Reader, fear not: Prime Air delivered the USB stick promptly and without damage. The aliens are destroyed, the world is saved, and, best of all, the film ends. This asinine adaptation of HG Wells made the internet laugh and critics weep by incorporating Amazon products into its plot with all the subtlety of an Amazon-choice sledgehammer. But whilst War of the Worlds was exceptional for the sheer shamelessness of its comically-conspicuous product placement, it’s hardly alone among recent films in proudly plugging products and branding.
Take F1, another film from earlier this year. The high-octane racing film starred Brad Pitt as a retired Formula 1 driver who is brought back to race for APXGP - a fictional racing team with some very real sponsors. Throughout the film, Pitt and others parade around in their APXGP uniforms branded with logos from Expensify, Mercedes, IWC, Geico and EA Sports. It’s a wonder they didn’t stamp an insurance-broker logo on Pitt’s forehead.
Last year, Madame Web was ridiculed for lots of reasons - wooden performances and a haphazard script chief among them, culminating in a bored Dakota Johnson listlessly delivering lines like “he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died”- but another complaint was that the film felt like a long commercial for Pepsi. We’re used to seeing ads before a movie starts, but now we’re expected to sit through them until the last credit rolls.
With films like Barbie, a two-hour promotion for Mattel that also featured a range of other products as props, dominating the box office, a trip to the Multiplex is not as escapist as it used to be: even our toys and our superheroes inhabit our recognisably branded world.
In light of changing viewing habits, film and TV is becoming increasingly reliant on funding from brands.
Why is that? Well, for one thing, audiences are consuming movies and TV differently, and brands are evolving to keep up with viewing habits. Traditional avenues for advertising are decreasing, with more people watching content on subscription-model streaming services that don’t rely as heavily on advertising revenue. Likewise, online ads are often skippable after five or 30 seconds. When was the last time you watched an advert online to the end?
In light of these changes, companies are partnering with movie productions to get their products onto the screen and into the audience’s subconscious. Good product placement is subtle, almost subliminal. Sometimes, it’s not even the result of a paid partnership; a brand may simply be included in a scene for the sake of realism. But whether paid for or not, product placement works best when it’s seamless. So when Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) talks to her father in a diner over a bottle of Coke Zero in season two of The Bear, it feels natural, even though the placement was part of Coca-Cola’s ‘Recipe for Magic’ campaign. Compare the subtlety of The Bear’s Coke Zero placement to the ridiculousness of Madame Web’s villain getting his comeuppance by a giant Pepsi-Cola sign falling on him. (I would say spoilers for Madame Web but that ending already spoils itself.)
Brands also benefit creatively from these partnerships. Coca-Cola’s 2024 advert ‘New Guy’ was filmed in the style of The Bear episode “Fishes” - not difficult when both were directed by the same man, Christopher Storer. Nor are partnership deals solely about what ends up on the screen. Just as brands appear in movies, movies appear on brands, as with the limited-edition range of Fanta cans, released to coincide with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Rather than being a one-way street, however, product placement can be a marriage of convenience for both brands and productions, with corporate partnerships bringing in much needed cash for films looking for funding. Forbes estimates that F1’s sponsorship deals generated $40 million for the summer blockbuster.
It’s rare to watch something now without being exposed to a brand.
But more and more films are actively cosying up to brands in ways that feel strange. In Friendship, Tim Robinson plays hapless marketing exec Craig Waterman. At one point, Craig licks a hallucinogenic toad to get high, but such is his conformity and dearth of imagination that his psychedelic trip is just him ordering lunch in a Subway. The scene feels like an extended ad break in the middle of the movie. In fact, Subway was not financially behind the scene. Writer and director Andrew DeYoung just wanted to film something funny. “I always thought that we would have to rewrite that and make it some generic sandwich shop,” DeYoung told Variety earlier this year. “But Subway was so down. They even showed up to set and were giving Paul [Rudd] tips on how to make a sandwich!”
Of course the Subway suits were happy. The scene may on one level be a critique of how branding seeps into our collective unconscious, but audiences still got to watch Paul Rudd preparing a footlong sandwich. (Black Forest ham on Italian herb and cheese, usual toppings.) Few complain about the artistic integrity of a Happy Meal toy being devalued by a cinematic tie-in, but films, even mainstream ones, surely lose artistic virtue when actors, writers and other creatives are competing with corporate identifiers. It’s rare to watch something now without being exposed to a brand.
All of this should make us fear for movies of the future, as well as the movies of the past. The future of product placement may well lie in virtual product placement, whereby logos can be digitally-added to a scene after it’s been filmed. An ad on the billboard behind a character’s head can be swapped from a Denny’s to a Wendy’s, the beer bottle in their hand edited from a Coors to Budweiser. The technology is progressing, with companies like Mirriad leading the way.
In such a world, a frame of film becomes a piece of content, invariably alterable, infinitely profitable. What happens when a film is never a finished product, when the final cut comes not from the director but whoever happens to be footing the bill? Will we one day watch The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy’s rubber slippers happen to be Prada? The legal and technological ramifications are still developing, but the moral and aesthetic implications are obvious. Under the logic of maximum profitability, no film is safe from the whims of an economic system upon which that film supposedly relies. In other words, with no bulwark between art and advertising, art will surely suffer. The question is how much will audiences take before they start to turn away? Or will capitalism reach a stage where we can’t imagine art separate from branding? We may get to a point where Han Solo wearing a Rolex won’t even seem strange.