Each year, hundreds of brands — cars, computers, clothing, kitchen appliances, and lawn chairs — grace the silver screen.

Sometimes brand appearances are overbearing (think a 30-second-long glamour shot of a Lexus driving down the coast); other times, they’re so subtle you might miss them if you blink.

But how do these brands end up in major motion pictures? What do the economics of these deals look like on the back end? And is this an effective form of marketing?

|   Friday Feature

A frequent misconception is that all brands pay a fortune to appear on the silver screen. 

In some cases this is certainly true, but for the majority, there is no cash exchanged at all between the brand and Hollywood: Producers need props, and brands are happy to loan them out at no cost in exchange for exposure. 

Prop departments constantly get inundated with products hoping to fill a production team’s needs. So to stand out among the masses, brands will often hire a product placement agency — but others prefer to handle their product placements in-house, bypassing the middleman agencies.

Dell started doing this more than 20 years ago by cold-calling folks in Hollywood and organically building relationships in-house.

Characters in the hit TV show The Big Bang Theory using Dell laptops (via Warner Brothers Television / CBS) 

Gary Moore, who runs Dell’s global product placement team, says that the brand has been featured in dozens of TV shows and films over the years, including The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019).

In 2020, Dell made a cameo in 19 films, including 5 minutes of screen time in Bad Boys for Life that, alone, was worth ~$8.5m in ad exposure.

Whether a movie needs 100 military-grade PC desktops for an FBI scene or a dozen laptops for a startup office, he’s the go-to guy.

We have a vetting process we look at to make sure that a show or film is a good fit for our brand,” he says. “We want to make Dell is represented in a positive light, and we turn an opportunity down if we think our products will be used in a nefarious context.”

To ensure this, Moore often flies from Austin, Texas, to Hollywood just to read potential spec scripts.

“I say to every brand that comes my way, you should be doing product placement and it’s not as expensive as you think.”

But just how effective is product placement as a form of marketing?

Dominic Artzrouni is the founder of Concave Brand Tracking, a firm that offers detailed analytics on the performance of product placements in film.

Artzrouni provides brands like Dell with data on screen time, discernibility, logo visibility, context (location, associations), and — most importantly — the value they derive from their placements.

“Product placement is the gift that keeps on giving,” he says. “The ROI can be ridiculous; a brand might get into a film for free and get $3m in value from it.”

|   We're rebranding!

Starting January 26, we're changing our name to Marketing Against the Grain.

If that sounds familiar, you're probably a subscriber to the podcast of the same name (thank you!). The podcast and newsletter share a mission of bringing you marketing insights and tactics from the people who are actually doing the work.

In addition to the new name, you'll see a new design, and emails will come from Marketing Against the Grain by HubSpot Media — but the content you signed up for isn't changing, and neither are the people behind it.

This week's email was adapted from our sister newsletter, The Hustle, which you can subscribe to below. Reporting by Zachary Crockett.

Subscribe to our other newsletters
Business news, but not boring: The Hustle  |  Stay current on AI: Mindstream  | Sell better: The Science of Scaling

Follow Masters in Marketing on LinkedIn and Instagram

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.