The economics of movie production placements | Hacker News Reader

The economics of movie production placements

thehustle.co

24 pointsalkhidr10 comments

>Any time a brand’s logo appears in a film — even if it’s just in the background somewhere — producers have to get clearance from the company to include it.

That contradicts the first result from google: https://www.legalteamusa.net/can-you-use-a-brand-product-in-...

(And the Louis Vuitton lawsuit mentioned in the above article was later dismissed so Warner Bros didn't need their permission: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/lou...)

Also, there was another recent article I can't find at the moment that talked about brands that appeared in movies/tv that the companies didn't know about ahead of time because the producers never contacted them. The companies didn't care because they liked the free publicity.

The citation link in that line itself is about stuff like music licenses and doesn't mention props at all.

Getting clearance from the company is more for mutual benefit than a legal requirement. Why not get some money or at least the equipment for free if you can?

It's interesting contrasting the economics of product placement in big budget features with something like the way these guys market themselves.

https://www.vivaladirtleague.com/

Right on their front page they offer various 'packages' for product placement in their skits ranging from background placement to full skits about a product. It seems like they do pretty well for themselves. They went from almost zero budget to being able to pay casts and crew and their production quality has increased dramatically. Their videos do tend to contain some pretty obvious product placement and some from some pretty big name brands.

"Any time a brand’s logo appears in a film — even if it’s just in the background somewhere — producers have to get clearance from the company to include it."

Why?

Temporary "production" companies are setup by Producers for the creation usually a single film or series. When filming is complete, these companies are sunset, and cannot have recurring revenue.

The Producer gets funding for their project from distribution company (Paramount, Disney, etc). The distribution company is the long-lived company that recurring revenue has to go to.

The distribution companies work as a cartel, whereby they have an existing revenue stream from all the product placements in existing films/tv that they want to protect. So as part of the Producer's contract with the distribution company, they must get the permission of the distribution company to include branded products in their films.

As someone who used to write contracts for a distribution company, this is correct. The distributor doesn't want to take on liability. For a self-released film, a producer takes on this risk- it's not a problem unless you get sued.

Because money.

And then there's Absolut, which offered a large sum to Tim & Eric to produce a video that mentioned Absolut in any way. This was the out-there result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p0QtJMKt1s

I wonder how effective these paid placements are like Blackbery in Up in the Air. It seems the free ones are the only worthwhile ones.

Title should be product placements not production placements

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