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Thread: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
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2019-09-13, 07:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-09-13, 07:12 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
I fail to see what the big deal is. Frankly I really don't care if well-known products such as Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation and etc. included in the movie. It doesn't bother me at all not even a little bit. So I really fail to see your complaint about any product in the movie.
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2019-09-13, 07:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
There's a difference between the versimilitude-breaking issues created by a world that is ostensibly modern-day Earth if you actively purge all known brands from view, compared to shoving said brands far too prominently into the screen.
It is also, one imagines, a very difficult line to tread in today's environment. It requires a light, subtle touch and unfortunately, Big Business these days is about as subtle as Unicron wearing a Lady Gaga outfit breakdancing on your house while singing "I know a song that gets on your nerves" at the top of his voice and repeatedly parping an approrpiately-sized airhorn.Last edited by Aotrs Commander; 2019-09-13 at 07:26 PM.
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2019-09-13, 07:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-09-13, 08:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2019-09-13, 09:06 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
One of the purposes to making a movie is to make money. Inventing fake brands doesn't suit that purpose. Besides, showing me that a character drives a Greenhilt doesn't tell me anything about him Showing him driving a BMW does.
I actually like commercials. I like having companies help pay for my entertainment.
I particularly like the companies that track my preferences and tailor their ads to me. I've found out about new books from favorite authors, and new items I want to buy, because Amazon puts ads (recommendations) based on what I've bought in the past. This means fewer ads for products that don't interest me.
Recently, I saw the ad for the next Order of the Stick book on this site, and have already pre-ordered it. Hooray for that commercial!
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2019-09-13, 10:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Last edited by Peelee; 2019-09-13 at 10:18 PM.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2019-09-14, 04:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
But then you're breaking versimilitude from modern Earth, since, like it or not, brands ARE that deeply integrated into culture. (Over here at least, non-one uses the phrase vacuum-cleaner at least in my end, it's always the "hoover." Just for example. I also don't recall anyone ever asking for a "cola," everyone asks for a coke (or MAYBE a Pepsi, but as one comedian once pointed out, for a lot of people (myself included) that is a "same difference.") It is always VERY obvious when you're using a made-up brand (for example, any time a show has ZNN or some other ersatz stand-in for CNN or something - I notice that immediately, and I'm not even an America or someone who uses CNN as a news channel). So if you're trying to make a grounded and realistic program -
- I'll be honest, I can't especially say that Mr Tarantno's body of work is particularly what I would call grounded and realistic (while I'm only especially familair with that one parter on CSI he did once, and it was a bloody good two-parter, it may be as close the realistic and grounded as he ever does); that is not a denegration of said work, by-the-by -
- obviating things that exist from the real world world and replacing them with-made up ones doesn't help you, because you, the viewer, will know that's exactly what they're doing. (Imagine how successful picking something at semi-random, Big Bang Theory would have been is they couldn't have mentioned any real popular cukture.)
But there is a very fine line between that and product placement.
(The problem being that Business wants every mention to be Advertising.)
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2019-09-14, 08:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Then why should it matter if a movie used a brand name product (whatever if it real or made-up) at all? It doesn't bother me at all then it's shouldn't bother to everyone else. Like who really cares.
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2019-09-14, 08:45 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Not based on anything I said. All I said is that there is a legitimate movie-making technique he's not using -- which he already knows.
Not all movies use all techniques, and not all techniques are good for all movies. There are no CGI dinosaurs in Titanic, no product placement in The Three Musketeers; no sword-fighting in The Wizard of Oz. Those legitimate movie-making techniques don't fit those particular movies. If Tarantino thinks product placement won't enhance his movies, I haven't said that he's making them wrong.
There is no logical connection from anything I've said about product placementto the conclusion that movies without it are being made wrong.
Pretending somebody said something they didn't say doesn't not further the discussion in any useful direction.
Only if other people are in the scene, and visibly reacting. If somebody drives up in a Honda, to a street where every other car is a BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus, then the audience has been given some information before any person has been shown onscreen.
When a character walks into a bar, the beers people are drinking are often used to indicate the socio-economic status of the bar, with nobody reacting to them at all -- because they see it every week.
What we know about products, and who uses them, is often used to set a mood without any audience reaction at all.
Yes, I agree with you to a certain extent, also. Product placement is a way to set a mood or a location, but it isn't the only one. Tarantino might be correct that the potential benefit might not offset any negative he perceives. Or maybe the first person who tried to get him to do it had a bad specific idea, and he was put off the idea forever.
I certainly agree that it can be badly done. If you distract from your story to have the character who is usually picky about whether his vodka martini is shaken or stirred suddenly get a Coke and repeat their slogan, "It's the real thing," then you've broken his characterization and probably the audience's focus.
But there is no logical path from "Not everybody does it" and "It can be done badly" to "it's not a legitimate movie-making technique."
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2019-09-14, 09:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
In the same movie as the Big Kahuna Burger and Red Apple Cigarettes people talk about the Quarter Pounder. It seems to me he seems fine with acknowledging the existence if brands without advertising them by showcasing logos, for example.
8f that's used to say something about a character, sure. If it's thrown in without consideration for how reality is, or thrown in because a company paid for it? That argument goes out the window. James Bond driving a Ford doesn't say anything about his character or sudden MI6 budget constraints, but rather that Ford dropped some cash.Last edited by Peelee; 2019-09-14 at 09:34 AM.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
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2019-09-14, 10:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Agreed. It also says that it was poorly planned product placement and inferior movie making. This is no different from my example of using James Bond drinking a Coke as a bad example.
I have no inherent problem with the filmmakers getting Aston-Martin to pay for the fancy car that he used in several movies. That helped to define the character. It was good product placement and good movie-making.
Product placement, like any other aspect of movie-making, can be done poorly or well.
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2019-09-14, 10:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Like I said, very fine line.
I mean, I have a little bit of it myself, given this very board's rules. I will often talk (usually to ponythread) about this and that I've done for work and sometimes show it off (e.g, I'll happily tell you I spent fifteen years working on my starship rules, Accelerate and Attack, before finally publishing 'em), but I've never actually linked anything to my website or webshop or anything, because would be, like, advertising. It's a hard line to walk, though; at what point does merely seeing the thing itself or mentioning it count as advertising? Made harder by these days, business and brands tend to be so damn touchy about their image that just "it's in the background" isn't enough for them, they sort of want it in the foreground where it shouldn't be - the free publicity for it just existing on-screen doesn't seem to be acceptable, it seems.
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2019-09-14, 11:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
That's also why I made the Ford example, because I totally agree the Aston Martin says a lot about him. However, if you bring out a Foyals Foyce without dropping the name or logo, that can still say just as much about the character. You could drop a second-and-a-half pan over the inside of the car just to show the leather seats and huge built-in screen in the dash, you say just as much about the car and the character without spending that same second-and-a-half on the logo without nearly as many complaints.*
*unless what you want to say about the character is they care about branding over quality, in which case it totally makes sense, but I don't think they'd be getting as big a cash bag from that manufacturer.Last edited by Peelee; 2019-09-14 at 11:23 AM.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
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2019-09-14, 11:45 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
I have a lot of very grumpy thoughts about commercialism in general, but I'll save those for some other thread (probably on some other board, since it might bleed into the political if I got too far into overall philosophy).
For this thread, there are a couple of distinctions that make something bug me or not bug me.
The best example of something that doesn't bug me, yet is obvious, blatant advertising, is movie trailers at the actual movie theater. It makes sense in the context of trying to get people "ready" to watch the real movie to show something to warn everyone that the movie is starting soon, get to your seats, and so on, and a few trailers can serve that niche while also usually being a useful heads-up of movies that are in some way similar to the one I'm about to watch will be coming out soon.
As a kid, when I had fewer other ways to learn about upcoming movies but went to the theater pretty much every weekend with my friends, I definitely used before-movie trailers as a major source of information about which movies I might want to see in the future. (My friends and I tended to look at the movie listings in the paper each weekend and pick one or more movies we hadn't seen yet but that were playing nearby, so having a vague hierarchy of which movies were more likely to be somewhat interesting was important since we'd end up seeing about half of the available movies that weren't R or G during the summer for a few years there.) This was before you could stream long movie trailers on the internet, so movie theaters were also the only way I'd see a longer trailer for an upcoming movie. This probably helped it feel like it added actual value as well.
However, when they started showing ads for things that weren't movies at the movie theater, it really irritated me. Those were not useful information for future theater visits, they were not narrowly targeted at "people who are watching this specific movie will be excited about this", and they were things I'd already seen on TV plenty of times. This trend was one of several reasons I stopped going to the movies so often. (The slides with irrelevant ads when you got to the theater early were fine, because they kept the lights up during them and you could talk with your friends. Replacing them with something with noise and lowered lights meant that they were harder to ignore and either talk or read a book through.)
Product placement frustrates me when it doesn't really make sense, although I find it irritating when I notice it regardless. For example, a few years back some car company or other (I don't even remember which one) clearly had a deal with ABC to showcase their cars and their specific features across multiple ABC shows.
On Castle, it was only somewhat contrived to find a reason why they'd be driving a whatever-mobile and need to use the in-car wifi or backup camera for something. I noticed it, and found it mildly irritating, but it at least fit the world and tech level of the show. However, when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. did the same thing, it felt actively ridiculous since that's a show which routinely had super-tech far better for the purpose than would be found in some whatever-mobile, so suddenly trying to use their consumer-grade car for that would be like a plot point where Batman decides to go buy some new crime-fighting gear at Walmart rather than use his regular stuff. (It's theoretically possible to do a story where an equipment-based superhero needs to do that, of course, but this particular episode did not go through a process of depriving them of their regular tools for plot reasons and them all figuring out how to improvise, it just had them driving a whatever-mobile in the course of an unrelated plot and using its nifty consumer-level tech features to solve some contrived problem along the way rather than their better gear they used all of the rest of the time.)
On the other hand, as a kid I loved all of the various 80s shows that pretty much existed to sell toys. Being able to buy the figures from the show so I could also tell my own stories about those characters using the figures was really appealing to me as a kid. (As I got older, this changed into telling entirely original long-running stories with Barbie dolls on sets I constructed myself and with elaborate notes, which then morphed into just building character sheets and settings using GURPS since it had much better tools for the kinds of characters and settings I was interested in playing with than Barbie did, but when I was younger having the pre-existing worldbuilding of something like Care Bears was appealing.)
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2019-09-14, 12:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
I like commercials in the sense that they provide a break.
there's something about running out of the room at light speed during a commercial, to fill up on chips, go to the bathroom. that you just can't get without them.
I equate the whole thing to this playwright (someone), who would flicker the lights during a show, to break the audience's immersion. Also, staring at something without break, isn't really that natural.
something, something... instant gratification is bad.
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2019-09-17, 06:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
In the very same scene as the mention of Big Kahuna Burger isn't Brett drinking a Sprite?
As for the OP question, I accept that commercials are part of certain types of entertainment (mainly TV). Some are entertaining but most aren't (with some just being obnoxious). I watch TV and they help justify the shows on TV so I can live with them. Nothing stops me from changing the channel or leaving the room when they come on. Of course, if I can watch something on Netflix (or another streaming service) where there are no commercials or on HBO I usually do so.
I do actually like the targeted ads online though. I don't like the data collection that makes them possible, but if I am going to see ads I would rather see ads related to my interests. I occasionally see something that interests me and sometimes I buy that thing.
If anyone wants to see what a movie with fake products (mostly, I think the cars are still real brands) they need to watch the movie Repo Man (80's Emilio Estevez movie, not 2010 movie with Jude Law). All of the products in the various store scenes are generic. They all have white packaging with blue words indicating what they are (Cereal, Meat, Soda, etc). Whole stores stocked like this. There's a few clips on YouTube* to give you an idea of what it's like.
*I never link YouTube videos on here (or many other places for that matter), are there any guidelines for what's okay in terms of content? These would be clips from an R rated movie from the 80s.
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2019-09-17, 08:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Last edited by Peelee; 2019-09-17 at 08:16 PM.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
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2019-09-26, 10:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
My award goes to a commercial that's not only supremely annoying, it also doesn't even tell you what the product does or why you'd want to buy it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_SwD7RveNE
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2019-09-27, 12:08 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
I used to think that was a harmless, if annoying, ad. However... Lifting directly from Wikipedia
Spoiler: The goggles, they do nothing!Unlike traditional headache medicines, the efficacy of HeadOn has yet to be systematically studied in any controlled scientific experimental study.[15] In line with other homeopathic medicines, Miralus Healthcare claims that the medicinal properties of HeadOn's ingredients are released via its dilution technique.[16] However, the dilution technique leaves virtually none of the active ingredient in the product,[17][18] and nowhere in scientific literature has the claim been supported that dilutions are effective in releasing the medicinal properties of any ingredients.[17][19]
Moreover, none of HeadOn's ingredients have any scientifically supported effectiveness in treatment of a headache. One of the ingredients, white bryony, is a highly toxic berry that is lethal if 40 such berries are ingested;[20] however, dilution leaves virtually none of this ingredient in the product, which is why its makers can claim the treatment has no side effects[16] (or any effects at all[17]). Another ingredient, goldenseal (hydrastis canadensis), has no known effectiveness in the treatment of any condition.[21][22]
The efficacy of the HeadOn product is supported by a few questionable testimonials found on the Miralus Healthcare website.[16] Miralus also markets many other questionable healthcare products containing low, if any, levels of any active ingredients.[16][17]
So... legally speaking they probably can't tell you what you are supposed to use it for. So on the one hand yeah it's an annoying ad but on the other hand it's not damaging the companies reputation since they are nothing but a scam.Sparxs Plays: My friend's Youtube gaming channel where you can watch us.
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2019-09-27, 12:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Sure they can. "Headon, for headaches!" Nice, nondescript, not promising anything, not making any claims whatsoever, holds zero weight whatsoever, perfectly cromulent advertising there.
Of course, I ain't no law person, so that's just my opinion, but it sure sounds watertight.Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
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2019-09-27, 01:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Reminds me of the pills advertising vague, un-verifiable brain-related implications that advertise themselves as containing something originally found in jellyfish. I've taken to yelling "ah yes, jellyfish! Nature's scholars! Truly the wisest of creatures, much celebrated in fables" and such at the tv when that one comes on. (This mostly happens when I am stuck watching hours of news coverage with my grandma.)
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2019-09-27, 07:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
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2019-09-28, 11:33 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
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2019-09-29, 12:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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2019-09-29, 08:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
I believe it used to say that it was for headaches, but they got word that the Better Business Bureau was putting together a lawsuit so they scrapped the "for headaches" portion of the advertisement. Can't get sued for false advertising if you never say what your product is for.
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2019-09-29, 10:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2019-09-29, 11:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Commercials: Like It Or Hate It?
It was more simple than that. The original ads called it a headache treatment. The FDA decreed that this was an unsupported health claim and ordered a change.
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2019-09-29, 01:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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2019-09-29, 01:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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