A brand’s product can reach a screen three ways, and only one of them looks like a normal advertising buy. The first is a paid placement: a contract with a studio or network that can set how visible the logo is and how long it stays on screen. The second is organic placement, where a company hands over free product with no guarantee it will ever appear. The third is the one nobody negotiates. A writer puts a real brand into a scene without asking the company at all, and United Talent Agency’s Jillian Raskin puts that third route at around 90% of everything that reaches the screen.
What a paid deal actually buys
A paid placement is the only route with terms attached. The brand and the studio agree contingencies covering how the product is shown and for how long it holds the frame. Coca-Cola’s deal with the second season of The Bear shows what that looks like in practice. The company bought advertising across Hulu and paid to have a bottle of Coke Zero sit beside Ayo Edebiri’s character in a scene built around her late mother’s birthday. UTA had already secured the brand early access to the scripts, so the team could pick the scene rather than hope for one. This awards season, Raskin’s agency also placed Lyft in Shrinking and Montblanc in The Bear, alongside spots in The Pitt, The White Lotus, Abbott Elementary, The Studio and The Penguin.
Even a paid deal cannot buy a hit. General Motors paid to have its cars parked outside Barbie’s Dreamhouse. It could not have known the film would take $1.4 billion at the box office. Entertainment marketing strategist Victoria Anorve calls that partnership the “Holy Grail” of brand integration, and says 700 people now claim credit for it.
Free product, no promise
Organic placement asks for nothing but a supply of the product, most often a car, a phone or a laptop. The brand gets no guarantee the item will appear at all.
Barbie shows the pull a film can give a brand, paid or not. Auto Trader reported a 120% jump in interest in Chevrolet Corvettes after the Barbie trailer landed, and TAG Heuer’s chief executive has said customers now nickname one of its watches after the film. Birkenstock told the Guardian it did not collaborate with Mattel, Warner Bros or any of the cast. Costume designer Jacqueline Durran said its sandals were in the script from the beginning, thanks to writer-director Greta Gerwig. Google searches for “women’s Birkenstocks” rose 518% in the UK after release regardless, and the company went on to weigh a stock market listing at a reported $8bn valuation.
The 90% nobody pays for
Most brands on screen never signed anything. A writer names a real product without the company’s knowledge. Eggo waffles becoming Eleven’s chosen snack in Stranger Things shows how that can be pure serendipity for a brand.
It can also go the other way. Duke University publicly objected after The White Lotus dressed a character in a Blue Devils T-shirt while she contemplated suicide. Peloton’s stock fell 11% overnight after a character on And Just Like That… suffered a fatal heart attack following a session on one of its bikes. Fair use protection means an unauthorised appearance rarely reaches a courtroom, which is why a network such as HBO tends not to worry about the backlash. Even so, Raskin says some placements are treated as too risky to leave to chance, and gives the example of never showing an alcoholic character drinking a named beer brand.
Why the market has grown
Product placement was a $23bn global industry as of June 2022, up 14% in two years, according to figures reported by the Guardian. United Talent Agency has built an in-house product placement department. It uses its access to deal flow and a team focused on statistics to forecast the impact of a placement, to help brands decide where to spend. Raskin says producers facing budget cuts are taking a more active interest in placement as a source of funding, and increasingly cut out the network’s ad sales team to deal with brands directly.
None of that makes a placement easy to spot from the outside. Duolingo told the Guardian its cameo in Barbie was not paid for, even though the language app separately partnered with Mattel and Warner Bros on a cinema advert and flew its owl mascot to the premiere. If a brand stays quiet about a placement, it can be hard to find out whether it paid.
