Man Of Steel: Product Placement In The Film World

For quite some time filmmakers have been using product placement as a way to gain funds for their film. Someone in the production will be in contact with various companies, bidding spots for possible places to insert a product into a movie. This can be both good and bad. When done cheaply and without care it can feel shoehorned in and pull the viewer from the moving going experience. When done correctly, however, it can enhance the movie going experience by more directly aligning the film world with reality. A great example of this is Zack Snyder’s 2013 reboot of the Superman franchise, Man of Steel. Through placing products commonly seen in reality in the film world, Man of Steel showcases that product placement can be used to enhance the movie going experience. Even by blockbuster standards, Man of Steel has quite a lot of real life products spread throughout the film. This is because even before Man of Steel hit theatres it was breaking records. The film had more than 100 companies paying a combined sum of over 160 million dollars

What the showcasing of these real world products actually does is tie the film world ever closer to our own. This is not a bad thing. When it comes down to it, product placement is necessary. As Forrester senior analyst Peter Kim says in Bob Garfield’s The Post Advertising Age, “The more access people have to technology, the more they will use it to skip advertising (104). This is also why we are seeing such an increase in product placement. With technology advancing and the Internet allowing more and more people to develop apps and other programs to block advertisements such as Ad Block and Ad Block Plus, advertisers are turning more and more to film and TV to showcase their products. With this in mind, is product placement in media not a better alternative to a multitude of online