Making Your Mark In Movies And TV

Nation's Business, Dec, 1998 by Dale D. Buss

When 'You've Got Mail," a Warner Bros. film starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is released for the holiday movie season, online services company America Online, Inc., will get what amounts to marquee billing. The stars play rival bookstore owners who fall in love via electronic mail, and AOL's sign-on screen is practically a member of the cast.

While marketing gambits such as that are almost routine for major companies, you don't have to be big to score big in the business of product placement-getting a company's name or products into the plot or onto the set of a movie or a TV show. Increasingly, small firms are learning how to share the screen with some of the world's biggest stars.

Consider:

In last summer's blockbuster movie "Deep Impact," Tea Leoni's character is a television reporter who's warning of impending doom as an asteroid hurtles toward Earth. While she talks on the phone with her estranged father about the end of the world, she sips Avalon spring water, bottled and marketed by Avalon Beverage Co. in Glen Allen, Va.

In another recent film, "Conspiracy Theory," Mel Gibson plays a government brainwashed assassin who persuades Julia Roberts, playing a lawyer, to visit his apartment, where Magnetic Poetry, a Minneapolis word-kit company takes a bow.

The firm's magnetized, Scrabble-style word strips are spaced randomly on the door of Gibson's refrigerator. Later, arranged on a metal counter, they form a sentence: "I love the delicate shadow of she wanting me to be." As Roberts furrows her brow, the camera lingers on the words.

And in the film "The Horse Whisperer;" EquiSearch.com-a Londonderry, N.H., film that serves horse fanciers-gets about 30 seconds of "face time" when Kristin Scott Thomas' character resorts to the firm's Internet-based information service to help her daughter-and their horse-recover from the trauma of an accident.

The World Wide Web site for all things equine brings up an article about the training technique used by Robert Redford's character, and the information becomes the key to everyone's living happily ever after.

How did Avalon Beverage, Magnetic Poetry, and EquiSearch.com get their wares before the eyes of tens of millions of viewers? These weren't accidental cameo appearances; they were the hard-won fruits of efforts by those small companies or by their agents. And the results of such placements can pay off.

A prime placement can fortify big brands. Fans of NBC-TV's phenomenally successful "Seinfeld" may be buying Junior Mints for years to come because the product, now a brand of Tootsie Roll Industries Inc., was the centerpiece of one of the show's most popular episodes.

Or a placement can catapult an obscure company to fame. Sales of Red Stripe beer, once a low-profile Jamaican brew, shot up more than 50 percent in the three months after Tom Cruise prominently sipped it during a Cayman Islands scene with Gone Hackman in 'The Finn."

"You can't get any more powerful exposure-except maybe word from a friend who swears by a product," says Robert J. Thomas, a marketing professor at Goorgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Product placement used to be the sole preserve of hefty-budget megabrands. And like the fictional advertisers who completely financed production of the program in the movie "The Truman Show," many big companies are willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of making "starring" appearances in flicks and sitcoms.

But below the deals at the top there s a lot of room for placements, and that's the game that increasingly is being played by small companies trying to find low-cost but effective ways to make a mark on a national level. Don't forget that "Seinfeld" also brought stardom to small businesses such as H&H Bagels and Tom's Restaurant.

"More and more small-business owners are catching on to the possibilities and are calling us," says Bettina O'Mara, a consultant in West Los Angeles who was the gateway to placements in "Seinfeld" and who remains the conduit for all productions by DreamWorks SKG and Castle Rock Entertainment, both in Los Angeles.

Follow The Candy

Sixteen years ago, Robert Kovoloff helped launch the placement industry when he arranged for lovable alien "E.T." to gobble up Hershey Food Corp.'s Reese's Pieces- after Mars Inc. passed on the privilege for its M&Ms-and now he's devoting a good chunk of his business to helping small companies score the same kinds of coups.

"A small company cannot buy any network TV;" says Kovoloff, president of Production Resource Center/Spectrum Entertainment in Encino, Calif. "A small company [typically] cannot buy national radio or billboards. I try to get them to the next level with placements."

It isn't necessarily easy. Product placement is a gambler's arena because it's unpredictable. It's the antithesis of paid advertising, in which audience exposure and response can be measured to the nth degree. Placement can require a lot of hard work. And it usually is effective only if it's integrated with the rest of a small company's marketing program.