Brand X - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Who put this poorly-fitting sticker on my Vaio?"

Uh-oh! He don't look happy. He's been using Brand X!

— The Joker in Batman.

Here we have a can of the world's most popular cola — no names, no lawsuits.

— Richard Hammond in Brainiac: Science Abuse.

When a script calls for a consumer product, and no one has offered the producers a Product Placement deal, a television program must resort to making up a brand — or, in some cases, obscuring a real brand so that it can't be identified. Another technique is to make a lookalike label that doesn't show the actual brand name — for instance, a bright-red soft drink can inscribed, in white letters, "Cola".

Under Canadian broadcast regulations, product placement is considered a form of payola and is strictly forbidden. Real brand names can't be shown on locally-produced TV shows. Dramas, comedies, and even cooking and home improvement shows have to block out the brand names of the items they use or replace them with Brand X. (TV sports and news/current affairs programs are exempt, the first because the advertising can't be controlled and the second because news programs can do whatever they damn well want.) These rules don't affect imported content, though.

In the UK product placement is forbidden too, but there's also the issue of "undue prominence", wherein a particular brand is, outside of any product placement agreement, given excessive exposure. (Mitchell and Webb noted this in great style with the conclusion that a porn scene about a satellite TV installer would have to be a gang-bang to ensure no single brand was given undue prominence.)

Sometimes fictional products can become story elements in and of themselves, either as part of the "world background" of a show, or as running gags.

Films with blatant product placements, such as the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, usually have them obscured when they are syndicated.

In addition to Brand X, some movie and TV producers may choose to use discontinued products as a point of style. Quentin Tarantino is known for using boxes of discontinued cereal in his movies, such as "Fruit Brute". Wes Anderson used a discontinued brand of European cigarettes in The Royal Tenenbaums.

At one time this was a universal practice in advertising, allowing a marketer to compare his product to a competitor without actually naming the competitor and reminding the viewer of why he might prefer it. The competitor would often be referred to as "the leading brand," giving rise to the question, "if your product is so good, why is the other brand leading?" In the last two decades, advertising has gotten bolder, and it is more common to see a real competing product in an ad than not — or at least a minimally veiled reference to a competing product (ie, a detergent box with the basic design and color scheme of Tide, but no logo). The practice of explicitly naming the competition was arguably begun by the great McDonald's/Burger King ad wars of the late '70s and early '80s. (Specifically, in a Burger King commercial starring a then-four-year-old Sarah Michelle Gellar.)

However, in some cases it may be mandatory. For example, in Germany it is against the law to specifically bad mouth a competitor's product, even if the statement is true. So if your tuna fish is completely mercury free, and a competitor's still has mercury in it, it's prohibited by law to say so while mentioning the name of the competitor's product, even though your statement is true.

In some kinds of advertisement, items other than the one advertised that would normally be used in its own branded packaging will be found in some kind of neutral or unbranded packaging. The most common examples of this are advertisements for cereals, in which milk will be poured from clear glass jugs rather than the carton or bottle it is sold in. It is probable that this is done in order to reuse the advertisement in different countries as much as for avoiding giving exposure to those other products.

Bland Name Product is a subtrope. See also Acme Products, which is any generic corporation that seems to supply everything a character, or entire cast, uses. When this happens with firearms, it is an AKA 47.

Incidentally, the notion of using fake brands that resemble the real brand (Using a pear instead of an apple, for instance) is being seen by marketers as something that improves awareness of the real brand. Amusingly, they're calling it Product Displacement.

Not to be confused with the band Brand X.