“For most of Gossip Girl’s first four seasons, none of the hit show’s glamorous teens carried the most talked-about smartphone of the last five years: Apple’s iPhone,” Peter Burrows and Andy Fixmer report for Businessweek. “Because of a product placement deal, they could only be seen with phones chosen by Verizon Wireless. Then, this season, shortly after the deal lapsed, several main characters started receiving their ‘Xoxo, Gossip Girl’ texts on Apple’s hit device.”
“The cast’s sudden conversion cost the Cupertino (Calif.)-based iPhone maker nothing,” Burrows and Fixmer report. “Apple has spent decades strengthening its subtle but powerful grip over Hollywood, and unlike many companies, says it never pays for its products to appear on television or in movies.”
Burrows and Fixmer report, “The company’s gadgets were discussed or shown 891 times on TV in 2011, up from 613 in 2009, according to researcher Nielsen. In the same year, iDevices appeared in more than 40 percent of the movies that topped the weekly box office, according to Brandchannel, which tracks product appearances. That’s nearly twice the penetration of the next most common brands in Hollywood — Dell, Chevy, and Ford.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, if Apple’s the “other cult,” what’s the cult in Hollywood that Businessweek’s headline (same as above) references? Excessive dieting? Plastic surgery? Money? Drugs? Multiple sequels? Dianetics? What?
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