Last night, I watched One, Two, Three the 1961 comedy directed by Billy Wilder and starring  James Cagney, who took a 23-year break from films following completion of this movie. It probably took him that long to recover — frenetic doesn’t begin to describe the pace of this piece.

If you’ve never seen it, One, Two, Three tells the story of C.R. MacNamara, an executive with Coca-Cola heading up the company’s West Berlin office at the height of the Cold War. MacNamara’s already full plate of wife, kids, mistress and scheme to climb the corporate ladder threatens to spill over when the boss’s Southern belle daughter arrives and promply elopes with a card-carrying communist. Wackiness ensues as “Mac” tries to save his career by transforming the unsuitable son-in-law into an acceptable capitalist member of the family. In true Wilder satirical style, capitalists and communists, Americans and Europeans, and men and women are equally skewered.

On one level, the most surprising aspect of the film is the blatant anti-Communist propaganda (in one scene, the young Communist husband tells his new wife, “They have assigned us a magnificent apartment, just a short walk from the bathroom!”) It’s perhaps not surprising for a movie set in Berlin at the height of the Cold War, but not something anyone born after 1980 has much context for.

But what kept the marcomm professional in me mesmerized is the fact that MacNamara is an executive for Coca-Cola. One of the first images you see after the Brandenburg Gate is a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Most of the movie takes place in MacNamara’s office and Coca-Cola, both the product and the company, figures prominently in the plot. It’s product placement (or brand integration) to the nth degree.

Products appearing in various forms of entertainment has been a time-honored advertising tradition for years, maybe centuries. Shakespeare is suspected of indulging in a little product placement in Twelfth Night, when one of his characters recommends The Elephant as a good place to stay when in London. Transportation companies sought mention in Jule’s Verne’s book Around the World in 80 Days. Wings, the first film to win an Oscar for Best Picture, plugged Hershey’s chocolate. Soap operas earned the name because companies like Proctor & Gamble sponsored the daily serials. And the practice has only become more commonplace.

Many manufacturers pay well (in cash or in kind) for key product placements, based on the overlap between a tv show or movie’s demographics with the product’s target audience — i.e., Juicy Juice’s prominent placement on TLC’s reality show Jon & Kate Plus Eight, Subway sandwiches appearing on NBC’s Chuck, couture designers on  HBO’s Sex and the City, and more too numerous to mention. It’s seen as an effective way to present a product in a setting that resonates with your key demographic without the drawbacks of a standard commercial — easily ignored, skipped, or shown next to a competitor’s ad.

A recent article by Brian Greenberg in the Boston Globe quoted Elena Zanolin, entertainment marketing manager for Dr. Pepper, as saying, “As the media landscape continues to become more fragmented, we do believe it is necessary to find creative ways to reach consumers and maintain relevance.’’

Product placement has expanded beyond tv and movies to social media. Facebook Fan pages are a sort of product placement (I don’t know about you, but while I like Dunkin’ Donuts, I don’t consider us close friends). A trend of late is companies providing free products to bloggers who then write reviews. It’s become so popular, the government has taken note. Bloggers who accept a free product or payment from companies and then write glowing reviews have recently come under fire from the Federal Trade Commission, who want to require disclaimers for “paid endorsements or testimonials” (thereby earning the ire of influential mom bloggers everywhere).

Not everyone has jumped on the product placement bandwagon. Some well-known companies do not engage in the practice — for example, despite being featured in everything from movies to tv shows to comic strips, Apple says it never pays to have its products used in these media.

Apple is in the minority. Global paid product placement grew 37.2% to $3.36 billion in 2006 and was forecasted to grow 30.3% to $4.38 billion in 2007, according to PQ Media, a provider of alternative media econometrics. 

But do consumers respond to product placement? They must — or at least, advertisers must believe they do — because the practice is so prevalent. Some data suggests that consumers are becoming jaded about product placement. Advertisers have responded by becoming more creative, evolving from the basic pay-for-position model to finding ways to integrate a product into storylines — often called “brand integration.”

One of the most famous examples of product placement is the use of Reese’s Pieces in Steven Speilberg’s E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Most people overlook a classic example of brand integration in the same movie: E.T. uses a Speak & Spell to summon his alien friends. What makes it brand integration? The product is integral to the plot; without the Speak & Spell, E.T. couldn’t go home.

Other examples aren’t hard to find. James Bond movies aren’t complete without the requisite cool car for villian chases and name-brand electronics, which often feature prominently in the plot, like in the recent Casino Royale.  Tom Hanks plays a FedEx employee in Cast Away and ends up on a deserted island with only a volleyball for a friend when his FedEx plane crashes. The tv show JAG featured the lives and loves of military lawyers working for the Judge Advocate General’s office (promoting both lawyers and the military). A Coke bottle wreaks havoc on an African tribe when it falls from the sky in The Gods Must Be Crazy.

And so we’re back to One, Two, Three and our fast-talking Coca-Cola executive. Coke products have been in  dozens (if not hundreds) of movies and tv shows. But Wilder apparently made MacNamara a Coca-Cola exectutive because “”I just think Coca-Cola to be funny. And when I drink it, it seems even funnier to me.” I suspect Coca-Cola’s rapid global expansion made it an easy target for Wilder’s digs at American big business and its Atlanta headquarters offered rich fodder for the many jokes Wilder made at Southerners’ expense.

Coca-Cola was reportedly happy with the generally positive portrayal of their product in One, Two, Three and enjoyed the windfall of free advertising. (Hollywood legend has it that actress Joan Crawford, then on the board of rival PepsiCo, called Wilder to complain about his focus on Coca-Cola, so the movie ends with James Cagney’s character holding up a bottle of Pepsi.) Coca-Cola certainly didn’t pitch their brand for integration or exercise any creative control over Wilder’s film.

Which makes me wonder: could a major studio release today feature a company or product so prominently without cooperation? Or is that a quaint relic of a simpler, more innocent and certainly less litigious time? And what might be beyond brand integration?

Let us know what you think the future of product placement is. And be sure to share your favorite examples.

Note: This blog post brought to you by the letter “S” and the number 3.

Labels: advertising, Billy Wilder, brand integration, Coca-Cola, Coke, E.T., James Cagney, movies, Pepsi, product placement, Speak & Spell

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