Did you know that Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a 114-minute advert for the toy company Mattel? Of course you did. You don’t have to be Detective Barbie to figure that one out. Yet you may have missed that the film is not just an advert: it’s an advert containing multiple other adverts. It’s a Matryoshka of adverts, each one nestled within the next, all contained within a giant, plastic doll.
Watching the film, I rolled my eyes at the starring role played by a spotless Chevrolet 4x4, and laughed aloud at the way the camera focused on Barbie’s (empowering!) heart-shaped Chanel bag. Ryan Gosling, as Ken, wears three TAG Heuer watches at once at one point, and I instantly knew Mattel would sell the “I am Kenough” hoodie he sported at the end (although my cynicism didn’t stretch to imagining its £58 price tag).
Product placement in film is by no means new (some date it back to the presence of Red Crown gasoline in the 1920 silent comedy The Garage), but it seems to have picked up in pace – and shamelessness – in recent years. In 2015, the BBC asked whether it had gone too far in the James Bond franchise. But at least that was based on a series of books. Now, you can put adverts for watches, cars and handbags inside an advert for dolls. And it doesn’t stop there.
In early August, reviewers noted the “bizarre” and “brazen” presence of brands in Disney’s comedy horror film Haunted Mansion, which – like Pirates of the Caribbean before it – is based on one of the company’s rides. Haunted Mansion includes shout-outs to Amazon, Yankee Candle, CVS, Baskin-Robbins and Burger King – never mind that, like Barbie, the film was already an ad. (Disney did not respond to an email asking it to confirm or deny product placements in the movie.)
The trouble with all of this is that it appears to work. Auto Trader reported a 120% increase in interest for Chevy Corvettes after the Barbie trailer dropped, while TAG Heuer’s CEO has claimed that customers are nicknaming one of its models the “Barbie watch”. As of June 2022, product placement is now a $23bn (£18bn) industry globally – a 14% growth in just two years. In an era of skippable ads, companies are clamouring to be featured inside movies and shows.
Yet if brands don’t boast about it, it can often be tricky to find out whether they did indeed pay (or provide free products in exchange) for promotion in a film. Other kinds of collaborations are even murkier. It didn’t occur to me, for example, to question a nod to the language-learning app Duolingo in the Barbie film. The company’s press office told me the gag wasn’t paid for, but Duolingo did collaborate with Mattel and Warner Bros, creating an ad that runs before the film in cinemas. Duo, the brand’s owl mascot, was invited to the LA film premiere.
Meanwhile, I was convinced that the suspiciously sharp logo on Barbie’s Birkenstocks proved that the company had paid for placement in the film, but Birkenstock told me it did not collaborate with Mattel, Warner Bros or any of Barbie’s actors. According to Barbie costume designer Jacqueline Durran, Birkenstocks were in the script “from the beginning” thanks to the writer-director Greta Gerwig. The sandal company has benefited regardless, as Google searches for “women’s Birkenstocks” have soared 518% in the UK since the film’s release; the company is now considering going public with an alleged $8bn (£6.3bn) valuation.
Ironically, it can feel more authentic to include multiple brands in movies, because brands are everywhere in our real lives. And while spotting product placement once elicited a groan, audience resistance might be relenting. Earlier this year, the advertising company BENlabs published a survey into the UK market it had conducted that found 88% of respondents “experience positive emotions” after seeing brands in TV shows, with 60% saying they have searched for a product they’ve seen on TV.
It’s important to take this kind of polling with a pinch of salt, but what’s clear is which way the industry is going. You may not have heard of BENlabs, but it may well have been inside your brain. This is the company that put KFC into Stranger Things, Dunkin’ Donuts into Orange is the New Black and Skype into The Mindy Project. It and other companies are also trying their hand at virtual product placement, a technique in which brands can be added into content post-production, meaning you could theoretically swap out a cereal box for different markets or even add new products into old films.
Product placement regulation isn’t the same everywhere. In the UK, it has only been allowed in British TV since 2010 and any episodes need to feature an Ofcom-mandated logo. But these distinctions matter less and less in a world of ubiquitous American streaming platforms. Barbie and Haunted Mansion are movies already banking on pre-existing IP (intellectual property), Hollywood’s favourite letters. Nike, Tetris and Blackberry are just some of the companies whose origin stories or products have been dramatised in films this year.
About 65% of people skip online video ads and TV viewing is now at its lowest since Ofcom records began, so ostensibly viewers are watching fewer adverts than ever. I fear that, in reality, all we’re watching is ads.
Amelia Tait is a freelance features writer
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