Product Placement Exercise
The recent release of Skyfall and the news that Heineken spent $45 million dollars to have James Bond drink its beer makes a perfect introduction to the issue of product placement. The following is a brief discussion of product placement and an exercise I developed for the artifactual communication chapter in my nonverbal communication book�still in manuscript. I thought this might be useful to those teaching the nonverbal communication course or a unit in an introductory course. In much the same way that we make judgments about people on the basis of the products they use (jewelry, furs, and name brands from Prada to Old Navy), we also make judgments about products on the basis of the people who use them, a tendency that has spawned huge product placement efforts by major corporations. Product placement refers simply to the placement of a product�for a fee but without any explicit advertising statements�within a scene of a movie or television show to give it a certain image. The a...