The Avengers was the highest grossing movie of 2012 and one of the biggest box-office hits of the past few years. Below you can see the highest grossing movies (worldwide) in 2012 courtesy of Box Office Mojo. On the picture you can see that while The Avengers had quite a hefty production budget, there were some movies, which spend even more. Unfortunately for them, they got less in return.
Fortunately for The Avengers the producers hadn’t transformed (pun intended) their big budget into big budgeted product placement. Actually there was only one brand that was clearly visible: Acura.
Acura RDX was visible very clearly for a couple of seconds in the middle of the movie.
But there was another Acura car model integrated
in the movie: the NSX Roadster. What is interesting in that particular placement is the fact that Tony Stark (Iron Man) drove Audi R8 in both Iron Man movies. Following the automaker’s involvement with THOR in 2011, Acura secured its role as the official vehicle of S.H.I.E.L.D., the international peacekeeping agency of the Marvel Universe.
There was slightly different situation with The Amazing Spider-Man. It was full of brands; especially prominent was Sony with its television sets, tablet, Sony Xperia mobile phone and Sony Vaio laptop.
Sony’s involvement was expected, since they own Columbia Pictures which released the movie. However there were some other visible placements, mainly Oliver Peoples’ glasses worn by all main characters. Peter Parker wore Larrabee model, while Dr. Curt Connors had Emerson model.
There were also several brands that were used to portray the young Peter: Jansport backpack, Yashica photo camera, Nike sneakers …
Funny, Peter was using an old analog camera, but used Bing for browsing. Shouldn’t he use Altavista or something old school? :P
So what’s better: to have only one or two car brands in the movie or the whole portfolio of products, several fashion brands, a car or two, mobile phone, photo camera …
According to numerous forum posts, blog posts, tweets … moviegoers prefer movies with small number of placements. If they’re done properly and creatively they can bring huge success.
