While writing a blog post on Beats by Dr. Dre headphones (which will be online soon) I remembered that one of my recent buys was influenced by “product placement”.
Last April I bought new headphones: Panasonic retro model RP-HTX7, which was recommended by my friend who bought them a few months before me. He was very satisfied with them, but also mentioned something that was even more interesting. At that time the same model of headphones could be seen in the current Arctic Monkeys music video for the song Cornerstone.
Cornerstone was the second single from Arctic Monkeys’ third album Humbug. It was released in November 2009, but the music video debuted a month earlier. The video was directed by Richard Ayoade, who worked with Arctic Monkeys on videos for the songs “Fluorescent Adolescent” and “Crying Lightning”. BTW … Richard Ayoade is the star of British sitcom IT Crowd where he played Maurice, a “standard nerd” who struggles to communicate with anything that does not have a keyboard.
As you can see below the video shows Arctics‘ frontman Alex Turner singing the song into an old skool cassette player in a white room during the whole video. The other members of the band are not present in the video. Alex is wearing a rather big red sweater and retro headphones, apparently Panasonic RP-HTX7.
Unlike product placement in Lady Gaga’s, Christina Aguilera’s or Ke$ha’s videos, where products can be seen very directly, this video is somewhat different. I haven’t found any information that Panasonic had anything to do with the video. It could be director’s, costume designer’s or Alex’s idea to use the headphones, but it doesn’t even matter. Video looks good, though a bit odd, but nevertheless it includes great headphones. Perhaps unintentionally, the video achieved the »I want to have this product« effect. Or even better effect: »I have this product! «
Amazing headphones, they worth every single dollar !!