Ewhwlen
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2013–2023
0:50 · 2M views · Jan 18, 2012
A one-minute clip of an episode of Hawaii Five-0 featuring a blatant Subway product placement.
Used as an example of intrusive product placement in TV shows, in threads complaining about advertising.
5 comments from Hacker News
That doesn't bother me so much, because if Sherlock were a modern figure, he'd carry some kind of mobile device and use it the way he does in the show. There isn't a lot of pomp and cirucmstance made about him unlocking his phone and carefully navigating the nanometer-engineered laser-etched icon menus, isn't this device amazing, you should buy one. You near a text message notification (which many of us hear, from our own devices, or our neighbors', on a daily basis), he looks at the phone, the shot shows the phone, and highlights the contents of the message as a storytelling device, rather than as an advertisement for how pretty Apple's software is. I'd like to clarify that I'm not an Apple fanboy by any means - my mobile devices are all Android, and I primarily work on Windows machines. I don't have any issue with characters using modern technologies as part of a story, but when the storytelling detours for the sole purpose of advertising a product, it gets wonky. Some more of my favorite examples: Nissan/Fringe - [LINK] Windows Phone/Castle - [LINK] Hyundai/Burn Notice - [LINK] Subway/Hawaii-50 - this video On the flip side, Chuck did Subway's product placement very well - they just leaned into it and played it for laughs, rather than trying to oh-so-cleverly have Serious Characters eat Serious Lunch with Serious Nutritional Value. The show just owned the fact that Subway had shoved a crackload of cash at them and went overboard with it. [LINK]
Some examples of intrusive product placement: this video [LINK] [LINK] Especially bad when they make a character say or do something that doesn’t fit with their persona to shoehorn mention of a brand. Maybe it’s me getting older, but I can’t help but notice product placement, speeding up of shows, Netflix doing the opposite by stretching out shows with useless filler scenes, story arcs introducing unnecessary and tacked on side plots to increase # of seasons, extra sexual and gore content to shock. It really ruins watching media for me. The last one I really liked was Breaking Bad I think.
Fair enough. I'd much rather have 3-4 breaks in an episode to surf around online/make popcorn/whatever instead of stuff like this in every show I watch: this video
>not yet within shows but give it time! It has long been within US shows, even before streaming, but it has gotten more and more egregious. this video
> this video Wow, that's really pushing the definition of product "placement". That needs another term like "in-show commercial".