Brand integrations are becoming jarring

Frankie attacking the Dean after finding him in a room full of Honda merch is my most rewatched clip from the whole show. 

F****** Billy Zane killed it in that episode.

Level 7 susceptible

Not to defend product placement by any means, but I feel like when someone says they're gonna call a car now, they say whatever brand they have on their phone unless they're one of those folks who checks both to see which has a lower rate. So whether it is Uber or Lyft or Gary, any of those is almost more believable than calling a taxi anywhere I've been in the last 15 years.

lol, I was thinking it was going to be Dot Com and Grizz, with swag.

One of the Subway episodes of Chuck was originally aired in 3D. I couldn't get the 3D glasses and normal red / blue ones wouldn't quite work and so it looked like ass. I have forever missed out on seeing Sarah in 3D.

I still scream Pottery Barn in Phoebe's anguished voice

Seriously. The first time I noticed it was on an episode of Smallville when Lois Lane moves to town, and she's talking to Martha Kent and basically the dialogue is Martha saying, basically, "Lois I'm so proud of you for buying a new car on your own. And it's such a nice car." Later on in the episode, it gets so much worse. Lois drives her new Ford Fusion^tm to a military base and she has to distract the guards. How does she distract the guards? Why by showing them the features of her new Ford Fusion, of course! The guard was like, "this is a really nice car!!" and Lois takes the time to show him the glove box that is ON TOP of the dash instead of on the bottom! What a unique feature! It was just as bad, watching an episode of Modern Family, a couple years later, and it was basically a big Apple products commercial from start to finish. That it's one of the highest rated episodes in the entire series kinda makes me want to vomit. Then there's also Summer Glau "sexily" devouring a sandwich from Subway on Chuck, or every electronic device in every Spiderman movie being specifically a Sony item... Tl;Dr - brand integration in media has been this shameless for decades.

Remember that greenish car in The Walking Dead they had for the first two seasons? Never got damaged and somehow always looked tastefully dusty instead of run down

I remember some pretty bad Microsoft product placement in Elementary too

The amount of blatant in your face Surface placement in shows god.

Genrecide lol. Uber would probably love if we said "rideshare". That said, I'll say Doordash even if it's Uber Eats so I guess you win some.

AirBnb, too. Nobody says Vrbo or Agoda or FurnishedFinder

I never got why Kleenex is the example used. I’ve never heard someone say pass me a Kleenex, at least up in the north east we say tissue. Band-aid on the other hand…

Friendly reminder to always say “I googled it”, lowercase, never capitalize it. Google hates that, because it weakens their trademark enforcement. There’s basically zero chance anything will be done about it, from what I’ve heard the last time a corporation lost its trademark due to it becoming a generic word was the 1950s, but the least we can do is try, fight your autocorrect’s attempts to capitalize the word and maybe some day the dominos will fall. There was a similar running joke on the podcast Comedy Bang Bang, Scott Aukerman would use “bing” as his verb for web searches, but made it clear he didn’t use Bing the product, leading to nonsensical sentences like “I binged it on Google”.

I use Duck Duck Go to do my googling. :-)

There’s other brands of jello?

The other doctor does mention an Uber as well. She suggests an Uber or a taxi and the patient says she can't pay for it. And they didn't make any note of Lyft being cheaper, it just seemed like that was what Whitaker uses. But him then explaining how ride shares work seemed a bit much.

Literally how they let it stay on the air.

The only people who might use copilot would be fooled by that

It would be like hearing someone say “Let me use a search engine for that” instead of saying Google. No one says “let me call a ride share”, that’s just not how people talk

Yeah of all examples to pick, that one didn’t even cross my radar

That one was either overreported or just badly reported. If you Google “Apple won't let bad guys use iPhone," literally every article cites Rian Johnson and Knives Out. So you get dozens of reports about it, but only one source. Meanwhile, there are plenty of villains using Apple products both on Apple TV+ and shows like Only Murders in the Building, with >!Marshall using a MacBook to write his screenplays!< What Apple doesn't want is someone using their products in a nefarious light. So you can have a bad guy call his mom on an iPhone, but not using an app on it to detonate a bomb in a grade school.

this isn't a link to when they play sonic 06

I think that Ford must have had a huge push for product placement in the early '00s. I remember watching an episode a Smallville where Lois is trying to drive onto a military base and the guard is very impressed with her new Ford Focus.

I just started Season 3 on my rewatch and man I forgot how much Ford/Lincoln marketing there really is. Like it didn’t really take me out to see FBI driving Navigators but the amount of main/notable characters driving Fusions or Tauruses or the Flex is ridiculous. I also completely forgot about some scenes that were absurd, like Peter using the hands free navigation to find a route to Portland only to go “that was absurdly easy”. Like nobody talks like that.

The whole Blue Sky era of USA Network basically doubled as car ads.

No but that sounds like a Fringe episode so I’ll hit it eventually during my rewatch.

Even that too sounds weird, especially when he gets the email and having him say "the car is fining me $250" instead of saying what the ride share service is

If someone says they’re “ordering me a car” I’m thinking a Lincoln Towncar or something. “Call you an uber or Lyft” makes most sense in every convo if we are talking about one of those platforms. 

Wasn’t she eating Taco Bell, or something similar, back during the lobotomy as well?

I think another reason it feels so jarring is the *type* of show. The more I think about it it seems like that sort of thing mostly stuck around in the form of reality shows and other “low tier” TV, it wasn’t very common in scripted TV. In scripted TV you’d typically have more subtle stuff like all the computers in the background being Macs with the Apple logo visible, except for the one episode where a computer broke or got a virus when it would inexplicably be a generic PC with no branding. Or some shows might have a character push the voice control button in their car to ask for GPS directions, no overt references to the brand but they’d certainly zoom in to make sure you caught it. Usually the only times you’d get overt name drops would be in comedy shows either making fun of or lampshading the practice. But reality shows were often a lot more shameless with the brand integrations. I have vague memories of the first season of American Idol featuring like heavily sponsored day trips for the contestants between rounds where they’d do lots of product placement and name drops, and of course rewards and prizes on reality shows and game shows would often just be plain old ads for the products. If some dating show had them all take Waymos to dinner or something nobody would bat an eye, it’s when the scripted shows do it that it feels forced. Also for a long time it was seen as kind of “off limits” in the industry. Like it happened and corporations and perhaps even networks wanted to push it, but it was seen as selling out and stronger creative leads would push against it. There was an episode of The Larry Sanders Show about the network forcing brand integration and the whole subtext was that it was beneath them and a sellout move that made Larry and the producers look weak. And when other shows addressed it it tended to feel like saying “we’re above this, you can’t make us do it”, or “we’ll do it but lampshade it and not take it seriously”. If the show was big or had a strong team they could rise above it and not stoop to that level, and for a long time with “peak TV” there was plenty of audience and ad revenue to go around so maybe it wasn’t pushed as much to not upset the balance. It feels like creative control and integrity is maybe at an all-time high for particular creators who have a lot of clout and pull but also lowering across the board for everyone else. If you want a new show and aren’t the guy the network gave a blank check contract to you have to submit to demands of brand integration or stupid stuff like verbalizing the action on screen for people second-screening the show. And that’s a big part of what makes it feel so new and different, because it’s showing up in the types of shows that didn’t used to be subject to that kind of thing, at least not as obviously.

While making sure the label is perfectly positioned facing towards the camera