Donald Pittenger has an interesting post about product placement and novels. He points out that though many films these days include product placements, your better novels typically do not. Novels, he argues, are written for posterity, and including references to contemporary brands will instantly date them.
Using product names is dangerous because, over the span of decades, product lines can be abandoned and companies can go out of business
My problem with product placements isn’t so much the idea of dating a story: peppering a paragraph with four different brand-names (the example Pittenger uses to demonstrate his point) is just bad writing, plain and simple. Typically in writing, a brand-name is used to help date a story. Take a look at this excerpt from my memoir:
I was wearing an orange and yellow striped shirt, my well-worn Hush Puppies, and my favorite green Toughskins-the ones that didn’t have any patches. “Hurry up, Luke! We don’t want to be late.”
Luke was tucking his red plaid shirt into red Toughskins. “Wilson says it’s important for us to look good. We don’t want them to think he doesn’t take care of us.”
If you don’t know what Toughskins are, you can get it from context, and if you do, you remember a particular era when every kid wore them; you also learn something about the economic status of these kids, whose idea of dressing up was wearing the playpants without any patches or holes. “Hush Puppies,” too, can probably be deduced from context: they’re clearly not pants, so shoes is the next logical choice. Whether or not you remember “Hush Puppies,” the name itself certainly conveys a generic seventies cheesiness.
That’s the real problem I have with product placements in movies and on TV: so often they’re there only to make money, not to advance the story. One of the most famous product placements of all time, “Reeses’ Pieces” in E.T., worked well precisely because it was not the obvious choice: M&Ms. It said something about these quirky kids that their favorite candy wasn’t the candy everyone else was eating at the time. Plus, it’s just funny to hear E.T. say “Reeses’ Pieces.” If M&Ms had ended up coming through with the bigger bucks, the movie would have been worse for it.
For now, books seem to have avoided the pay-for-placement trap, and can use products to help set the scene, to tell us something about the characters, to advance the story. Like Pittenger, I believe it will be a dark day when books start taking product-placement payola; only I have a different reason.
I remember hearing that M&Ms was the first choice but someone misplaced the memo and didn’t respond to the studio on time. Even if that isn’t true, it’s a lovely little urban legend.
Product placements in movies are a studio choice. Product names in a text like a book or an essay are chosen by the author — not an editor or a publisher. I wrote a whole essay about getting stuck at a Mary Kay party, for example. . . It wouldn’t have been half as funny if it were just a “cosmetics party” essay. Mary Kay is much more evocative. So what if it gets dated? Some things last longer than others, and cultural context is always important.