The no longer hidden persuaders
By Robert Goldrich
In 1957, Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders, a seminal book on advertising and marketing that was on The New York Times best-seller list for a full year. “Many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives,” wrote Packard who passed away in December 1996. He compared motivational research and certain marketing techniques to “the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother.”
Fast forward to today and for some that chill has become more pervasive, with product placement and brand integration burrowing their way deeper into all walks of life, including entertainment content such as movies and TV programs. However, helping to take a bit of that chill out of the air by shining a light on product placement, promotional tie-ins and the behind-the-scenes meetings that bring them about is filmmaker Morgan Spurlock with his latest documentary, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
The film explores product placement in movies–but with a unique, humorous, tongue-in-cheek twist. Spurlock made the movie itself an exercise in product placement, directly pitching agencies and prospective sponsors on the idea of funding the documentary in exchange for visibility in the film. For example, the full official title of the documentary is POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
The movie shows Spurlock as he seeks backing from corporate folks, brand managers and agency execs. Beyond the not-so-subtle product placements for the dozen or so sponsors, also woven right into the documentary are three commercials conceived by and featuring Spurlock–one for lead sponsor POM Wonderful 100% Pomegranate Juice, another for JetBlue, and the third for Hyatt Hotels & Resorts.
In addition to POM, JetBlue and Hyatt, the sponsors who came on board were: Amy’s Kitchen (frozen foods), the Aruba Tourism Authority, Ban antiperspirant/deodorants (whom Spurlock connected with via New York ad agency kirshenbaum bond senecal+partners), Carrera sunglasses and Solstice Sunglass Boutique, Mane ‘n Tail Shampoo, Merrell footwear, MovieTickets.com, Old Navy, Seventh Generation household products, Sheetz convenience stories, and Thayer’s Natural Remedies.
All the sponsors come off quite well in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, and took quite a leap of faith to commit to the film to begin with in that there was no promise of how they would be depicted. Spurlock’s credits after all include the Academy Award-nominated feature documentary Super Size Me in which he showed the effects of eating a diet consisting exclusively of food from McDonald’s for an entire month.
“I took care of my sponsors,” said Spurlock, commending them for being willing to relinquish creative control. He sees a lesson there, noting that if advertisers and marketers want to make a positive impact, they need to be woven into a film in a way that fits the storyline, meaning they have to cede meaningful control to the creative community.
In his recent talk at the TED Conference, Spurlock related his experience on the film, saying that for the most part he made little or no progress when pitching ad agencies and product placement firms. He said that a number of agencies seemed to be risk-averse, to the point where he wonders if they even presented his ideas to brands. It was when Spurlock started engaging brands directly that he started to make headway.
Meanwhile, the documentary has made its own headway on the festival circuit, debuting at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and showcased earlier this month at both the Miami International Film Fest and the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is slated for release by Sony Pictures Classics on April 22.
Spurlock affirmed he is not looking to banish product placement from films and TV. “I don’t want to see a guy holding a beer can with a label that just says ‘beer’ on it,” he said. “Advertising and marketing are part of our world. What I hate to see, though, is a blatant extreme close-up of a product to gratuitously set up a scene. Over the last year or two, some of the most blatant placements have surfaced in film and television. My goal is to make people start to re-examine what’s going on.”
In fact, Spurlock has proven that he can embrace advertising. While making the documentary, he took time out to direct spots for Hunt’s Tomato Sauce out of New York agency Nitro via Saville Productions, which handles him for commercials. The spots feature chef George Duran dropping in on the Glen Cove (NY) Volunteer Fire Department with Hunt’s to help make lasagna for the firefighters. The work was so well received that Nitro came back with repeat Hunt’s biz for Spurlock.
Furthermore, the aforementioned three commercials–for POM Wonderful, JetBlue and Hyatt–appearing within The Greatest Movie Ever Sold reflect Spurlock’s deft creative and directorial touch in short-form fare.
For The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Spurlock described his role as being “both a filmmaker and an anthropologist. I needed to be careful that I did not become part of the punch line or part of the campaign. I had set out to see how important advertising is in our daily lives; maintaining that perspective was the only way I could get the movie made. I also wanted to maintain a healthy respect for all of our sponsors and what their goals are and meanwhile I remain the third eye observing it all.
“I think this film does a great job of pulling the curtain back in a way we’ve never seen,” continued Spurlock. “After people watch this film, I think they will start to look at everything a little differently, especially the way they are marketed and advertised to every single day of their lives.”
Spurlock’s filmography includes his first feature, Super Size Me, which besides the Oscar nomination earned him best directing honors at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and the inaugural Writers Guild of America best documentary screenplay award. He has since gone on to direct and produce the acclaimed FX television series 30 Days, and the films Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, Confessions of a Superhero, Czech Dream, Chalk, The Future of Food, and What Would Jesus Buy? Spurlock also directed a segment of Freakonomics, a documentary based on the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Exposes the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. Notable filmmakers each took on documentary adaptations of different chapters in the book, which was on The New York Times best-seller list for more than two years. These documentarians included Spurlock, Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), the team of Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, a.k.a. LOKI (Jesus Camp), and Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight). Filmmaker Seth Gordon (The King of Kong) directed the interstitial glue that helped to mesh these chapters into a unified film.
Additionally Spurlock directed and co-wrote The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3-D! On Ice!, which garnered nominations for a primetime Emmy and a Writers Guild Award.
Currently Spurlock is in postproduction on his next feature documentary, Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan’s Hope.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More