Props without brand labels
Filming with low/no budget can be challenging, but it’s is what we do in Producing and Directing. Still, sometimes scenes seem to look like paid product placements simply because producers forget to frame out logo designs and visible brands. In this blog, author Zoe Sohenick talks about product placement – and how her team intentionally avoided showing labels – in relation to the article Modern Family: Product Placement by Kevin Sandler.
Props in Juniper Spring
by Zoe Sohenick
Product placement is almost inescapable in our world of media consumerism today. It’s really about how it is done: creatively, or for profit. Is it possible that there could be no branding in a production at all? Kevin Sandler (2013) writes an interesting analysis of Modern Family’s episode “Game Changer” and its product integration of the iPad. With the line between entertainment and marketing becoming increasingly blurred, Sandler discusses how product integration in scripted broadcast media is now inevitable. Viewers now have the ability to watch media in any way they please whenever they want. Time-altering viewing (DVR, ad-skipping, On-Demand, streaming) has made it harder for advertisers to sell to consumers through commercial breaks on television, so companies have had to come up with a new way to market (Sandler, 2013). That’s when they came up with the idea of product placement, the practice where manufacturing companies can pay for film or television programs to include their products in a production for exposure.
Sadler references Havens and Lotz’s three categories of influence when it comes to creating media: mandates, conditions, and practices. This idea is known as the “Industrialization of Culture” (Sandler, 2013). To me, this says that there are too many influences from corporate funding, industry growth, and employee needs. Even though the iPad wasn’t sponsored in this episode of Modern Family, it does however prove the point that branding is almost inescapable in our culture. This particular episode of Modern Family was simply reflecting our reality of what was popular at the time of its airing in 2010. Sadler defends creators saying that product placement can be done creatively when baked into a character’s wants or needs, or when it is baked into a storyline. When product placement is baked into the storyline of production, audiences assume that there is some form of advertising being done, especially when there is no other competition for the brand or product (Sandler, 2013).
When it comes to our production of Juniper Spring, we didn’t need to abide by financial constraints since we aren’t creating this project for profit, but that doesn’t mean that our props aren’t important. Juniper Spring is about a young woman trying to terminate her pregnancy in a world where that is completely illegal. Throughout our film, we did our best to hide any type of branding because it is distracting to the storyline of a film. We even left out any sort of branding for the pregnancy test, the most important prop. When it is seen in the opening scene, it is shown without a logo or its packaging. As producers, we told all of our actors to make sure they weren’t wearing any clothing with logos or brands during filming days. There is also a small mention of a “period tracking app” towards the middle of the film. We alluded to an “app” rather than a named app so there wouldn’t be any distraction as to what app she uses or why. As producers of a student film, we were able to leave out branding and focus on our story creatively because our film is not for profit and we had no budget.
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References:
Sandler, K. (2013). Modern Family: Product Placement. In E. Thompson and J. Mittell, How to Watch Television (253-261). NYU Press.
Image credit:
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko, courtesy of Pexels