But the result is not just a critique of product placement and the constant, ubiquitous advertising we see in our everyday lives. The film is itself the ultimate in product placement and advertising -- it was totally paid for by companies seeking to promote products.
Watch an interview with Spurlock about the film. Explaining the concept in a talk at the TED conference in February, Spurlock took the notion even further by selling the naming rights to his talk, a TED first and, Spurlock concluded, likely a last.
As Spurlock recounted in an interview with CNN, it was no easy task to find companies willing to back the film. His team started calling ad agencies. And so we said we should go to the brands themselves and, literally after calling hundreds and hundreds of brands, of which most of them said no, we ended up getting 17," including the Hyatt hotel chain and the company that makes Ban deodorant. Why were so few interested? Spurlock gained wide attention with his film "Super Size Me," a documentary in which he aimed to demonstrate the effects of fast food by eating only McDonald's food for a month.
Spurlock learns from an industry expert that his brand combines playful and mindful, an analysis he accepts happily. Most of the time, he's running around making pitches to beverage, car, airline and fast-food companies. This gives him an eye-opening education about the manipulative methods of the marketing and advertising world, and he dutifully shares his fascinating findings with us. Maybe armed with this knowledge, we won't be as easily manipulated by these unseen forces.
PG, 87 minutes. Is Spurlock trying to show how the dozens of products embedded in Iron Man 2 is somehow debasing American culture? Or, is he actually a shrewd pitchman, pretending to moralize about a practice that he is also profiting from? He donated it to charity. Spurlock showed up to an interview with BNET, sporting a black coat covered in the logos of the brands that financed his film.
He responded good-naturedly, even when asked about charges that he skirted ethical lines. Where did the idea for this movie come from? My producer and I were talking about all these blockbusters like Iron Man that had these product placements. And we wondered if a documentary that had those same partnerships and co-promotion could be a blockbuster? Could we have a 'doc-buster'? I wanted to create a film that shows how product placement actually works, all the conversations that happen every day behind closed doors.
You know, how the sausage gets made. So what did you learn from the making of the movie? What do you want viewers to learn? So is Spurlock, the indie-documentary darling, selling out?
When asked this in the CBS interview, he cryptically replies that as long as you're doing "better than they do, you're not selling out, you're buying in I'm just buying into the idea of studio film-making.
What do you think? Is buying in just super-selling out? Or is Spurlock a superhero for the very many out there who agree with Bill Hicks? This article is more than 10 years old. Arwa Mahdawi. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold's attack on the ubiquity of product placement could be seen as a win for the advertising industry.
0コメント