Hi everyone!
Today I wanted to talk about something else than a marketing trend. About a movie I saw, and I can hear you all think why does she post a movie review on a marketing blog?
Well, the movie I saw is called ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Sold!’ it’s a documentary about product placement. But the moviemaker Morgan Spurlock – who you probably know from his near-fatal fastfood diet ‘Super Size Me’- made his documentary fully sponsored by product placement.
The film’s slogan is “He’s not selling out, he’s buying in”. So the documentary shows you the work Spurlock putted into the finding of sponsors and him giving pitches to them.
The most companies he contacted immediately turned him down. Big companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola are only interested in sponsoring the big movies like Iron Man, because millions of people see that movie. They’re not interested in sponsoring small documentaries because the investment is too big. Spurlock than focused on the smaller brands for example Sheetz. They are a chain of gas stations and convenience stores, so Spurlock promised only to do interviews with people in the bar of Sheetz of at the petrol pump.
Another big investor was POM, it’s a pomegranate jus. So after the deal Spurlock was only allowed to drink POM-jus in the documentary. What stands out in the movie are the contracts that the companies give to Spurlock. They are about fifty pages long and they held a lot of rules that Spurlock was supposed to follow. But he decided only to give them a slight idea about the way they were going to be portrayed in the movie.
In the end the whole movie was sponsored and Spurlock got about $1,5 million from the companies featured in the movie.
I think that this movie is definitely a must for anyone who’s interested in product placement and the way the industry works. It’s very interesting to see how companies influence the movies made nowadays.
So this was it for this week… See you next time!
Lisa
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