Apple is the brand with the most product placements on both film and TV; the MacBook is the most placed product of any brand on both film and TV according to Merchant Machine which counted how often product placements occur in 2,227 movies and 890 TV shows featured on productplacementblog.com, the internet’s top product placement database. Merchant Machine calculated the number of placements that occur every 10 minutes of a movie’s runtime and analyzed the figures for brands and products to see which have the most placements in film and TV history.
Ian Wright for MerchantMachine:
Are brands everywhere in movies because they’re everywhere in life, or vice versa? Well, it’s noticeable that Apple is the most product-placed brand in both film and TV…
Apple has also been product placed 83.6% more often than second-placed Coca-Cola, appearing in almost precisely one-third of U.S. box office number ones since 2001…
Product placement in films is nearly as old as cinema itself. But the practice took on new life in the 1990s with meta-textual in-jokes in movies like Wayne’s World and Demolition Man — a futuristic movie with the background detail that every fast food joint except Taco Bell has been wiped out in the “franchise wars” (in Europe, however, Taco Bell was switched for the more familiar Pizza Hut). These ’90s pictures may have been responding to recent product placement big-hitters, such as 1985’s Back to the Future, which featured 5.6 product placements every 10 minutes. Today, Back to the Future is still the fifth highest frequency in cinema history.
The top spot, however, goes to the racing movie spoof Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006). With 8.24 splurges every ten minutes — 20% more than second-placed Ocean’s 8 — there’s barely time to catch your breath between product placements, the most prominent being NASCAR itself. However, many of the product placements were made as gags, and not all were paid. Some, such as Old Spice and Wonder Bread, were reciprocated with promotion for the movie.
Apple is by far the biggest player in product placement in movies and TV. It is a trend that seems set to prevail now that the brand’s own streaming service can put its products directly in the hands of fan favourites like Ted Lasso — who is even heard saying he’d like to buy Apple stock. One WSJ report found that across 74 Apple TV+ episodes, characters handled some 300 iPhones, 120 MacBooks and 40 pairs of AirPods — and that these devices were mostly restricted to the “goodies.” Filmmaker Rian Johnson has even suggested that the lack of an iPhone can give away a “secret” baddy in a film, spoiling the surprise for viewers.
MacDailyNews Take: Everyone knows that, just as in real life, only criminals and other assorted ne’er-do-wells handicap themselves with wannabe Macs and fake iPhones.
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