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The new software is user-friendly. This video was brought to you by BetterHelp, so it’s no surprise that something strange is happening at the movies this year—cinematic offerings are full of stories where branded products are the heroes. From Air Jordans to Tetris to Blackberry to Barbie to Flaming Hot Cheetos, these all celebrate what essentially amounts to very successful marketing campaigns. Cynically, we’d call them long commercials about commercials.
This isn’t a wholly new phenomenon—back in the ’00s, the MCU apparently chose Iron Man of the available options to kick off its franchise revival because marketing research showed that it was the toy kids most wanted to buy. These days, it’s hard to find a movie that doesn’t have direct product placements—whether it’s Transformers, Super Mario Brothers, or the collectible figurines of Cocaine Bear (which we are, to be clear, not mad about).
Meanwhile, in this media climate, it’s getting harder to tell what is and isn’t a commercial. With mattress companies and investment banks funding high-quality podcasts, Red Bull’s content mill is probably larger than your average indie film studio, and feel-good ad campaigns can hijack entire news cycles. Native advertising content has been disseminated even to the highest-caliber news outlets, while streaming, once a bastion of content uninterrupted by commercials, has desperately retreated to a classic TV model.
In short, it’s commerce’s world and we’re just consuming content in it. So how did we get here? Why does it feel like all the media we enjoy exists solely to sell us stuff we don’t need? Is everything a commercial now?
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And now, back to the show. So the truth is that ever since there’s been mass media, there’s been advertising to the masses. It took three whole years from the creation of the first official newspaper in 1609 in Germany for newspaper ads to appear in France. And then, by the late 19th century, New York City birthed the first newspapers fully dependent on advertising revenue.
Early advertising was pretty tacky, dominated by patent medicines (i.e. snake oils) that made some pretty wild claims. But as mass production ramped up, there were more affordable goods to sell than ever before—which meant advertisers needed to persuade people to buy things they’d never dreamed of owning. As historian Stuart Ewen puts it: “Now men and women had to be habituated to respond to the demands of the productive machinery.” And since then, each successive medium has quickly found a way to harvest human attention and sell it to advertisers.
As Tim Wu, scholar and author of The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, points out about the history of mass media advertising: “While cinema was probably the most emancipated from the advertising machine, it’s had its own semi-covert system of product placement institutionalized.” Due to the low click-through rate on ads, online advertising has had to become more creative in order to keep up with Brands manufacturing actual entertainment, such as journalistic outlets, sports leagues, or county fairs. As mentioned earlier, Cinema was for a long time the only real medium that wasn’t completely permeated by advertising, but as scholar Helene day Berg Woodman puts it, the generic distinction between traditional cannons such as film, television, and advertising have come under a degree of pressure. Film directors like David Lynch and arrow Morris have directed many films which meld advertising and traditional cinema.
According to dayberg Woodman, Cinema and cinematic advertising initially came from the same place, based on the logic of spectacle and visual pleasure. The promotion of allusions to elicit an astonished and delighted response started out as the provenance of both Cinema and advertising. Cinema of spectacle, exemplified by things like the Edison film that shows an elephant being electrocuted, was like traditional advertising using Cinema merely to titillate. But the two forms began to Splinter as Cinema became a narrative medium peppered with necessary spectacular or aesthetic elements and began to assume cultural legitimacy as a high art form.
Since the 1980s, Hollywood films have been increasingly commercialized by a more intensive merchandising, branding, and product placement. Think of ET, where Reese’s Pieces were practically a character in their own right. Due to uncertainty about the future of the film industry, which intensified in the 90s and never really went away, Studios have succumbed to paranoia and entered what scholar Paul Grange calls the “permanent marketing campaign”, where the selling of an entertainment environment is ongoing. In this way, films become the jumping off point for selling intellectual property as multimedia Brands.
Synergy has become a basis for examining the particularities of contemporary entertainment spectacle, this is only intensified with events like Comic-Con and product placement has also ramped up on TV. From 2006 to 2008, the average program went from featuring 10 brand references to a staggering 50. All of this affects the kind of content we get. For example, Marvel refused to let Iron Man have a female villain because they worried the toys wouldn’t sell as well, so the script had to be rewritten to sell villain toys. But it’s not just that film and television have become more commercially driven; advertising has changed too, specifically it has become more cinematic and aesthetically minded.
Deborah Woodman writes that as advertising becomes more complex, drawing from different cinematic, documentary, gaming and cultural references, its content has the potential to generate similar engagements of interiority, symbolic meaning and personal reflexivity that we attribute to film. In other words, commercials are increasingly cannibalizing artistic techniques to sell products.
BMW pioneered this with its action film-inspired `The Hire’ ad campaign in 2005, which starred Clive Owen as a bad professional driver and garnered nearly 100 million views over four years. In the history of commercials and film, the two came from the same place, but over the years, cinema matured into art while advertising remained mostly cinema of spectacle.
Today, however, the two seem to have switched tactics, with cinema slumming into commercialism while advertising elevates, thus the two sort of meet in the middle, as in the early days of cinema and cinematic advertising. We’ve regressed to a place where the line between the two forms has all but disappeared, and the biggest bummer of all is that these tactics actually work because brands have the budget to make content so good you don’t even realize you’re basically watching a commercial.
Journalist Anat Balint argues that embedded branding should be seen as a new commercialization phase in which brands gain omnipresence in the cultural public sphere. Put differently, we have returned to the early days of TV and radio when much of our cultural consumption was entirely sponsored and controlled by big corporations.
So should we just get it over with and submit to the cinematic offerings of Red Bull and BMW? Well, there’s a pretty major downside: namely, content made by brands is never going to be subversive. We saw this in the way brands shaped early radio and TV, insisting on sanitized, sponsored content that kept people happy and down to shop. Advertiser-made content is going to be advertiser-friendly; it’s not going to explore important issues, at least not without making them palatable, all while appealing to the widest possible audience. And unlike most truly great art, it’ll try very hard not to offend.
This is where we have to put our cards on the table and say that a creative culture completely built on commercials seems not great. A scholar, Robert Waterman Chesney, writes that the combination of public relations and advertising has made our time the Golden Age of insincere communication. Commercials, by their very nature, lie or at least embellish the truth, and when we’re being bombarded by commercials for hours a day, we’re soaking up a whole lot of insincerity.
So when there is no clear line between commercial and content, everything becomes a commercial, whether it’s a beloved franchise being rebooted largely around a very marketable toy, movies including plot lines that are little more than commercials for other properties, or a short film made by a company selling luxury vehicles. We’re left figuring out who is trying to sell us what every time we sit down to unwind.
But what do you guys think? Has art been fully invaded by commercialism? Can brands make films that are truly compelling, or will commercial interests always compromise quality content? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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