Product Placement - Television Tropes & Idioms

One of Survivor's (specifically Survivor Outback) most infamous moments actually revolves around one of the products offered as a contestant prize — the then-new Pontiac Aztek, which was not only paired with an immunity award during the actual show (which the winner also got to sleep in) but was also thrown in as prizes for the ultimate winner and winner-up. This Troper particularly remembers how the winning contestant of the first prized Aztek wouldn't stop gushing about its "amenities," though perhaps it's understandable giving how he had been stuck in the Australian Outback. Now looked upon as a Reverse Funny Aneurysm moment for how the car ultimately fell with a dud louder than the Edsel and for just how gawd awful the Aztek looked.
On 24, Jack Bauer and associates will always drive the model of car that is their main sponsor for that season, while villains will drive other brands. It has often been commented that you can tell whether a character is actually a spy based on whether he's driving a Ford or not. (Note that in the latest season Toyota is the show's main sponsor, and the Fords are driven by bad guys.)
- Season 7 has a rather blatant one, where the plot seems specifically written for the characters to show off the high tech features of the Hyundai Genesis (namely, to play an audio recording).
- Cisco Systems has been featured rather prominently in the last couple seasons. Admittedly, it's kind of amusing watching Cisco Systems trying to be sexy.
Heroes features repeated mentions of the Nissan Versa / Tiida. Almost all cars in the series are Nissans. Every one of the online comics begins with a Nissan Versa ad that is far bigger than the comic itself. It's become a Running Gag. Funnily enough, even though most computers in the series are Dells, the logos are taped over.
- There's also this exchange from "The Second Coming", in the middle of a remote desert:
  Matt: I gotta use your cell.
  Usutu: No service! I should've gone with Sprint.
- Sprint and Nissan are pretty much the show's two largest sponsors - beyond the Product Placement, at least half of the commercials are for either Sprint phones or Nissan cars. This troper is actually in favor of this, since Sprint and Nissan are probably footing the bill for Heroes' considerable special effects budget.
  - "Considerable special effects budget"?
- The first episode of Season 4 shows a Sprint logo on the Dial-a-Hero ad in Tokyo. Now that's amazing coverage.
- Also starting to be inverted, in that the show is starting to bleed into the commercials. During Season 4, there was a short commercial which was otherwise indistinguishable from a normal scene where one of the villains must sneak another one...a Sprint phone. It then cuts to a web address where you can presumably follow that side plot which will heavily feature cell phones.
The beginning of one episode of Alias has Sydney and Vaughn chasing a bad guy through a mall parking lot. When the bad guy takes to a car, Sydney points out a vehicle that would let them continue the chase by shouting "The F-150!" You'd think that would be a rather clumsy thing to say while running after bad guys, and something like "That truck" would be more efficient.
The recent Pilot Movie for the Knight Rider remake has one chase scene which is a painful example of this. KITT is a Ford, and the cars chasing it are Fords. Throughout the chase, we get closeup after closeup of their logos. At the end of a chase, the cars pursuing KITT are tricked into driving into a fully-loaded semi truck... and stop inches from the bumper (causing this troper and his semi-driving father to both yell "Give me a break!"); God forbid a Ford be damaged, after all. Later, just to hammer it in, a General Motors car is seen as a burning wreck.
- In the series, KITT routinely transforms into other Ford models for disguise or utility.
Curious about which car company is sponsoring Friday Night Lights this week? Just wait for the scene at Buddy's car dealership and see which brand gets its name mentioned.
The first series of Burn Notice was all about Sam's Cadillac. Series two glorified a Saab; one crucial high speed chase in the summer finale of season two turned on the Saab's outstanding Electronic Braking System. Sam later lost his Caddy.
The second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles features the 2009 Dodge Ram extensively, including showing off its many handy storage compartments and GPS system.
Ghost in the Shell's third movie, Solid State Society, features two Nissan concept cars which actually were revealed to the public for the first time through the movie.
The Transformers Film Series was plagued by this: every Autobot's altmode was a make of car owned by General Motors, except Optimus Prime, who was an (unbranded) Peterbilt Model 379 long-frame semi tractor; GM doesn't make an appropriate vehicle anymore, probably wasn't keen on reaching back to The Eighties for a GMC General, and no fan would accept Optimus Prime as an H2. Then again, the whole franchise is based off a line of toys, so quitcherbitchin. Also keep in mind that, later in the movie, an Xbox 360, Mountain Dew vending machine, and a Nokia cell phone are featured... coming to life and attacking people.
- When Ironhide gets his alt mode, the camera actually zooms on the GM logo appearing on his front grill.
- Optimus may have avoided being an H2 (Ratchet wasn't so lucky), but became a Dodge Ram in the Alternators toy line, specifically set up to allow our beloved Transformers to actually become licensed vehicles.
- Conversely, none of the Decepticon altmodes were General Motors makes. Barricade, for instance, was a (heavily customized) Ford Mustang.
  - Most of the Decepticons are military vehicles, which is probably why. As cool as it is, F-22s aren't available for private sale yet. Beside Barricade, all the non military decepticons of the first movie are: a) a robot scorpion, b) a radio, and c) an alien spaceship.
- Perhaps the most gratuitous product placement in the Transformers movie (and there is a lot to choose from, beyond the cars) is the slow, dramatic zoom-in on... a Panasonic sd-card. The girl even holds it with tweezers, lest her fingers block the name, while turning it gently in the light to make sure we don't miss its holographic reflective label while having plenty of time to read it. This is just so depressingly obvious in a movie where the other placement is usually entertaining in its own right (like Dispensor, Agent Simmons and the "nasty" little Nokia phone, and Bumblebee upgrading his model when Mikaela hurts his feelings).
  - More blatant than the X Box 360 Transformer who makes the 360 booting sound before transforming? Really?
  - It's more blatant because the 360 is obviously evil and attacks the person carrying it. Product placement usually can't abuse the product in question, either physically wrecking it or painting it in a bad light. Look at the rest of this page and see how many examples have their specific products handled like eggs in a basket or go untouched by the bad guys. Transformers probably got away with this and the Mountain Dew vending machine because they're so ridiculous they come off as comic relief, inciting a positive reaction from the viewer despite their negative portrayal.
  - At least the sd-card is a valid plot point, in that it illustrates how the girl is smuggling information out of the Pentagon. Most Michael Bay films are not that subtle.
- In Revenge of the Fallen, there's a poster for Cloverfield that's impossible to miss. If you're asking why it fits in this, consider that the Transformers movies and Cloverfield are both distributed by Paramount.
  - Wait, I missed it. I noted the conspicuous Mountain Dew vending machine in a dorm room, though, right in line with the camera after the character it was following moves to the right.
  - I missed it too, but I saw the Bad Boys 2 poster, another movie from Michael Bay.
In the 1996 film Twister, the main characters pilot a red Dodge Ram pickup truck which carries them safely through obstacles that destroy lesser vehicles. The truck meets its end bravely marching through a cornfield into a giant tornado (yes, seriously) to deploy a tornado-measuring Mac Guffin named DOROTHY.
The 2008 IronMan film gave us a nice look at Tony's Audi.
It is no coincidence that almost every motorcycle seen in Mad Max is a Kawasaki.
Fight Night Round 3 from EA Games has quite a bit; while usually themed with the sport (boxing), it seems a bit out of place where one cutscene is an actual ad for a Dodge of some sort. And for some reason Dodge has branched out from making things like cars to things like ... um, boxing gloves?
Oh my goodness, the freaking Yaris in Smallville. "Clark, my Yaris gets great mileage." "Your super-speed's out of gas, so take my Yaris." Yaris, Yaris, YARIS. It was almost as bad as the Stride placement detailed below.
Some of Cars' characters have real car models.
Frisky Dingo had some fun with this, as an entire episode simultaneously hawked and mocked the Scion TC: Killface plans to spread his plans for world domination on Live with Mitzi & Verl, but his first segment got bumped because the hosts were so caught up in discussing the car, then it takes up a good chunk of his second segment as well, before he sarcastically screams that once he takes over the world, "you won't have much use for 17-inch alloy wheels". The studio crew takes this impetus to show ad footage of the Scion behind him as he rants about everyone falling victim to "Scion fever", which the hosts and crowd also take and run with. He then storms out of the studio, and gets splashed with mud by a passing Scion TC.
- Don't forget the "Haggar pants gently caressing my thighs like a lover."
Strangely averted in Doomsday. The filmmakers decided the Cool Car should be a shiny new Bentley. Bentley, however, is too classy to do product placement, so they had to buy three brand-new cars at full price. They then wrecked two of them filming the chase sequences.
The Disney film rendition of George Of The Jungle either uses product placement, or spoofs it; hard to tell. This is most obvious with the pair of Nike Airs that George -who has until recently never worn shoes before in his life- pulls out for a trans-continental run and makes a big show of putting them on. As This Troper remembers a fair amount of time between the Nike Air introductory ad campaign and the movie, he thinks that this may be more of a homage to a cultural phenomenon than anything else. Other instances may include a brand of coffee (Hilarity Ensues when the caffeine -apparently foreign to George's system- synergizes with the sugar high he's on.
In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk, Private Eye," Sharon Lawrence's character describes her dented car as such: "This is a Lucerne 275 Northstar V8. I get a new Buick every year. It's my trademark." This was only the beginning: In the following three seasons, Natalie went through six cars, one of which was the aforementioned Buick Lucerne. Among others that were almost certainly product placement were an Audi and a Hyundai Genesis. It makes one wonder how Natalie can afford several different cars, considering how little she is paid. These cars are also heavily advertised on the Monk website. There is a Concentration-type game, where, in addition to characters' faces, you match parts of the Buick Lucerne. That remained, even after the sponsor of the website changed to Audi.
In the Bones episode "The Double Death of the Dearly Departed" Cam says to Brennan:
"Your Sequoia, it was, it was blocked, so I grabbed Angela's Matrix."
More technical racing games don't just have product placement for vehicles, but even for parts. Two excellent examples are the 4x4Evolution and the Need For Speed franchise after Underground, in which every single aftermarket component you can put on your vehicles, from turbochargers to car seats, is an actual product made by an actual company.
Some racing games are actually marketed with this in mind, like NFS: Porsche Unleashed and Automobili Lamborghini.
Tomb Raider: Legend had
- name brand SUVs driven by the bad guys.
- Lara rode a couple of name-brand motorcycles. In hot pants, an evening dress with the skirt ripped up to the hips, and racing leathers. For some reason the brand of motorcycle escapes me.
The 2004 Catwoman shows our heroine stare seductively at a Jaguar's hood ornament, after jumping into the middle of the street and the car almost (damnit! missed) hits her.
The Dark Knight has The Lamborghini. For bonus plug points, all the shots of The Lamborghini were filmed with the IMAX camera, while all the shots in the scene involving Gordon, Reese, Dent, The Joker, and the hospital (bar the explosion) were filmed in 35mm. Much more subtle indeed.
As with their deodorant example below, a recent episode of Eureka was pretty loud in its proclamation that the new Subaru is a good car. First, Carter is impressed when Jo shows him her new car, and she gets to brag about it; it's then contrasted with Fargo's crappy old car. Fargo then ditches his old car and gets himself a Subaru; Jo asks him how he pulled it off because she was on a waiting list for months for hers but he claims to have pulled some strings (apparently people in Eureka must not buy their own cars). But it's not until much later in the episode that Jo's new car saves the day by being the only thing that can get Fargo to where the others are in time to deliver some crucial information. Finally, near the end Fargo makes a solemn declaration that to make amends with his jilted car AI he'll install her in his new car right away.
- And don't forget that Fargo lists off the cars stats instantly upon seeing it. Safe to say Eureka doesn't take their product placement too seriously.
Recent games of the NCAA Football video game series have the Cadillac Game Changing Performance at the end of every game. Notably, the one replay you can't skip is the one that has the Cadillac logo plastered at the top-left of the screen.
JamesBond and his association with Aston Martin is legendary, although BMW got the product placement for Bond cars during the Brosnan era until Die Another Day, when Ford got the sponsorship rights again and pumped the movie full of Ford brands (Aston, Jaguar, Ford, etc.).

Close Cars

Due to their historical popularity among artists (like, say, production crews), distinctive stylings and extremely rabid fanbase, computers in fiction are more likely to be a Macintosh than in real life. They can be seen frequently on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Smallville and Veronica Mars.
- Also, iMacs looked good and were one of the few cases where the computer really did equal monitor.
During the early run of 24, all the good guys used Macs and the bad guys generic Wintel boxes. Recently the good guys started using HP computers. In the fourth season, the terrorists used Alienware gaming laptops, which is rather odd seeing as terrorists are usually on the run, therefore needing PCs with better battery life... unless terrorists happen to enjoy playing Counter Strike in their spare time.
- "Bomb has been planted." "Terrorists win."
  - Well, of course. How do you think they learn to murder?
Veronica Mars, especially in its final season, featured Apple laptops prominently. However, Apple obviously didn't pay for the privilege, as every time they're on screen the light-up logo on the back is blocked by something in the scene — a timestamp, a Post-It note, a box of licorice (really). It's done badly in the background of one scene with an Alienware laptop, where they put a sticker of the fictional college over the small alien head — despite doing nothing about the also-distinctive moulding on either side, which is much larger than the head and in a different colour.
Who could forget Jeff Goldblum's PowerBook 5300 in Independence Day? He later went on to do voiceovers in tons of Apple ads. (Ironically, the 5300 is probably one of the least cool Macs ever made — not actually a bad computer, but rather bare-bones for the time. Well, except for that incident involving the flaming Li Ion batteries.)
WALL-E has a makeshift television consisting of a magnifier and an iPod, among other Apple Shout Outs. Apple founder Steve Jobs used to run Pixar and is the largest stock holder of Disney-Pixar.
- The Evil AI uses a default text-to-speech voice option on older Macs.
- WALL-E uses the Mac boot-up chime.
Psych has, in a few early episodes, the main characters using an Alienware laptop.
The computer through which L communicates in Death Note is a Mac, although the apple logo is never actually visible. Likewise, Light's computer isn't explicitly identified but is recognizable as a Mac G4. Since the series was set Twenty Minutes Into The Future, it's a bit out of date now.
The laptop Stephen Colbert uses to vandalise Wikipedia (through the time-honoured method of Rapid Fire Typing) has a clearly displayed Apple logo. It's not exactly Product Placement, however, as he has been known to throw the laptop on the floor when he's done with it.
- Ditto for The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart's laptop always being a Mac.
All of Otacon's computers in Metal Gear Solid 4 are Macs. In the first cutscene in his "office", Otacon clearly has at least one Mac Pro, an iMac (the recent version that looks like a monitor with a little base), several MacBook Pros, and even an iPod (see the video game section below). Considering that this installment is set circa 2014, it seems like a minor anachronism, but anything in service to marketing!
- It's not quite as bad as the blatant product placement of the MSX in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, which was set in 1999. Snake even lampshades it by complaining about the computers being everywhere, saying that the only people who still use them are 'freaks'. This line was removed from the slightly modernized version available on the Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence disc, since it was no longer funny.
- There's also a Playstation 3 sitting on one of the tables in the Nomad; it's on the floor above the cargo hold where Otacon's workstation is set up. Sunny pulls a PSP out of a box, too. Vamp's cell phone is a Sony model.
An exception to Apple dominance is Dell, as the logo on its laptop lids and monitors not only is distinctive, but also stretches across the entire width of the product (especially prevalent are laptops by Alienware — which is part of Dell). This led to a glaring anomaly in the film V for Vendetta; in an early scene Lewis Prothero, "The Voice of London", is seen delivering a political commentary which describes the United States as being a state in crisis, suffering from civil war, widespread famine and verging on if not actually in economic collapse. And then we see every computer monitor bearing the familiar "Dell" logo (Dell being an American company... although they could have come from the "former United States", or Dell UK, or one of Dell's factories in Malaysia).
This also appeared in Stargate Atlantis, with the stranded Earth expedition continually whipping out the newest Dell gear for months on end, even before the Daedalus reached them.
On the other hand, Dexter's MacBook Pro probably wasn't supplied by Apple, since he runs Windows on it.
- I'm curious as to what kind of writing Deb's season 2 boyfriend would need to do that would require an Alienware laptop.
A recent episode of Heroes featured a scene between HRG and one of the baddies, the Hunter, taking place at the latter's apartment. What occupies the center of the screen in shots featuring the two of them? A large stack of Dell computer boxes. I mean, I know Dell sucks, but evil? Really?
Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad's computer scenes always showed enough of the edge of the monitor for a very large and prominent Compaq logo to be displayed.
Ouran High School Host Club not only uses Bland Name Products (most of which are seen in the anime), but in the manga we see Kyouya using an Apple computer with the proper OS displayed on the screen. He even has a few recognizable icons such as Skype.

Close Computers

Babylon A.D. had an airliner with a Coke Zero ad painted across its entire surface. Actually, New York City seems to be obsessed with Coke in the future; it had billboards everywhere.
A recent episode of the reality show Driving Force had two people eating KFC and blatantly plugging it — to the point where one of them read the nutritional facts panel to declare "It has zero trans fat".
An early example was the sponsorship of the second Doctor Who movie in 1966 by Sugar Puffs, leading to out-of-place posters advertising the cereal in a supposed post-apocalyptic world.
Smallville uses this to a sickening degree. In one particularly bad episode, "Product Placement Pete" returned to the show in full force after a three-year absence, in an episode called "Hero", which was pretty much a drawn-out Product Placement scheme for Stride Gum. The gum actually had a point in the episode — it got contaminated with Green Rocks and gave Pete super stretching powers — so it was shown much more often than the average Product Placement item.
- Also, Stride gum was mentioned by name over and over, never "gum" but always "Stride," and even one mention of how long the flavor supposedly lasts. At the end, a cured Pete offers Chloe some, holding it up to show the logo exactly as a person in a commercial would, and says "It's Kryptonite-free" as if that was its slogan. The entire episode was basically an hour-long Stride commercial with the cast of Smallville along for the ride.
The Argentine soap Rebelde Way doesn't miss a chance to promote some snack food or another. Amusing because it places the characters momentarily way out of character and because it's nearly impossible as a foreigner to determine what's the fuss about.
Chuck gleefully shills for Subway and Red Bull, to the point that they regularly hang lampshades on Subway's Five Dollar Footlong special, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by Real Life Comics.
At one point, WWE wrestlers Edge and Christian happened upon a vending machine selling RC Edge cola. Upon discovering that there's a cola "named after him", Edge declares, "Now, more than ever, Sodas Rule!"
Just about every time an episode of WCW Monday Nitro cut to the announce desk, a bottle of Surge would be plainly visible, with the label facing the camera.
At one point, X-Pac was pretty blatantly shown drinking Hansen's Energy - even on the way down the ramp before a match. In fact, his entrance video briefly featured several closeups of a Hansen's Energy can.
- This really obvious product-placement was parodied savagely on the (old) ECW by having someone 'force' wrestler CW Anderson to wrestle dressed as a bottle of power-drink. ("Cap" hat, little armholes sticking out of the bottle, really hard to get up once knocked over, etc)
Let's not forget about the 3 hour episode of WWE Raw that was commercial free. It may have not had actual commercials, but in between matches the announces would shill KFC and other sponsors. They even had a bucket of KFC chicken on the announcer table.
Pizza Hut has a very lucrative deal with Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion. While Humongous Mecha and Evil Eyes battle it out, Pizza Hut signs are in every episode and the cast eat pizza every chance they get. This gets slowly phased out over the course of the series, but one element sticks around up to the very last scene of the series: C.C.'s prized possession is a plush of Cheese-Kun, Pizza Hut's mascot in Japan.
- The logos are censored out in the American release because, according to a Bandai rep, Pizza Hut wasn't too hot on the idea of sponsoring a show whose protagonist is a vengeance-minded terrorist. Cheese-Kun remains unedited, presumably because the only Americans who know what it is are Geass fans who watched the show subbed.
The anime OVA Freedom was sponsored by Nissin Foods and apparently the only food available to the colonists on the moon is Cup Noodles.
Mai Kujaku (Mai Valentine in the English versions) drinks Pepsi in one episode of Yu-Gi-Oh. The reference was taken out in the American version. Starbucks coffee has also appeared. Many cards in Yu-Gi-Oh also happen to be shameless promotions for Konami games (Konami owns the rights to Yu-Gi-Oh) such as Castlevania, Gradius, Contra and even Metal Gear Solid.
The newest Evangelion movie is chock full of it, with Pizza Hut (again!), Pepsi, Doritos, Yebisu beer (not Yebichu), and UCC Coffee (whew!). Most of these have accompanying packaging advertising the movie as well.
- In the second movie, there is a Lawson Convenience Store inside Nerv Headquarters.
In the movie Wild Hogs, every beer, even in the biker bar, is a Michelob.
In Twister, to give the DOROTHY probes wings, the characters gather every soda can they can find. They're all Pepsi cans. In the South. You just try casually finding Pepsi cans south of the Potomac.
Enter The Matrix had a deal with Powerade. As such, there are Powerade vending machines all over the game.
Famously, Hershey's got "Reese's Pieces" into the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, after M&Ms balked on the project, thinking the movie would flop.
- Infamously, this decision likely led to Mac And Me, another movie about a kid and his alien buddy that seemed dedicated solely to shilling McDonald's and Coca Cola at every opportunity.
- M&Ms appear in the Novelization, presumably because they were still in negotiations while it was being written.
Domino's Pizza boxes can be seen all over the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. This is very deliberate.
- To really drive this home, in one VHS release, the movie is preceded by a Pizza Hut ad.
- Similarly, Pizza Hut signs are all over the Turtles' second NES game.
- The sequel had a Bart Simpson glass held up straight at the camera. Kinda logical given the plot but still...
Bee Movie had Bumble Bee Tuna in a pantry for the main character to do a double take at. (Too bad they didn't also go for Bit-O'-Honey with the candy with which the opposing lawyer was taunting him later.
In the future world of Demolition Man, every single restaurant and fast-food chain has been bought out by Taco Bell. And the characters often sing commercial jingles (the only form of "classic" music that's clean and wholesome enough for the incredibly uptight San Angeles). In Europe, where there are no Taco Bells, all logos were replaced with Pizza Hut logos and the lines were redubbed accordingly.
- Umm...not in the UK they weren't. Never seen a version that mentions Pizza Hut.
The Fifth Element has a McDonald's with sexy semi-dressed cashiers.
- Not to mention a driveup window for the flying cars in the middle of a logo that filled the entire screen, as well as several flying 'road train' type trucks, with each trailer bright red with the Golden Arches on it...
  - In a sequence featuring the actor Mac McDonald. *rimshot*
Idiocracy is unique in that it absolutely savages the brands that get placed. For example, Carl's Jr. will take your kids away if you can't pay for your meal (and pays one of the department secretaries every time he mentions them; seriously, he ends most of his sentences with "brought to you by Carl's Jr."), Fuddrucker's restaurant steadily devolves into Buttfucker's, Costco has bloated into a city-sized blight on the landscape with its own transit system, and Starbucks (and others) now offers hookers — family style. Supposedly, Gatorade was going to be the sports drink that had completely replaced water, causing all the crops to die, but they pulled out after they saw how their product was going to be treated, so Brand X product Brawndo was used in its place.
- And their Brand X product became a real one some time ago, complete with ads with awesome voiceovers.
- The hero still managed to describe the Brawndo in the fountains as "some kind of Gatorade" at least once.
- You want crazy? The court has advertising banners everywhere, and so do the government offices. The House of Representin' prefers Uhmerican Xxxpress.
  - Sadly, that's... not so crazy, given the infamous appearance of blatant advertising in some privatized schools and prisons in Real Life.
In a similar vein, Fight Club had Project Mayhem members smash in a Volkswagen Beetle and break into a Mac store — apparently, the director was approached by said companies...
- Project Mayhem break a large spherical sculpture and send it rolling into a Starbucks shop. On the DVD Commentary, the director said that once they had permission to use the Starbucks logo, they decided to stick it in anywhere they could possibly manage.
In the movie Cool Runnings, the Title Drop occurred in a scene with a prominently placed bottle of Coca-Cola. And near the beginning, there's a shot of eight sprinters about to race while in front of a MASSIVE Coke advert. It was on about the third watch that this editor even noticed the sprinters.
The 2000 (modern day) adaptation of Hamlet was chock full of these, but the most glaring one may have been when the ghost of Hamlet's father walked into a Pepsi machine and disappeared.
- It's worse during Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" speech in the middle of a Blockbuster.
Addams Family Values. Gomez is in the police station, ranting at how unfair life is, how certain things and concepts are 'pure evil' and is on the topic of a money-grubbing psychopath who has brainwashed his beloved brother. Meanwhile, in the back, is a product plug in the form of the police station's very bright, very noticeable Coke machine. Someone Missed The Point. That...or someone had a very delicious 'Take That' moment against Product Placement.
The infamous Leonard Part 6 features an outraged Bill Cosby confronting his daughter and her septugenarian boyfriend, and holding a Coca Cola bottle next to his face the whole time.
A blatant example from lonelygirl15 is the Ice Breakers Sours Gum, which is shown in "Truckstop Reunion". When Daniel asks what Bree is holding, she gives the full name of the product (rather than just saying "gum"), holding the packet up so the viewers get a good look at the logo. Daniel and Jonas then beg Bree for some gum, but she puts all four remaining pieces in her mouth instead, to the boys' dismay.
Superman II has several, the most memorable probably being when Superman flings one of his fellow Kryptonians through a giant electronic Coca-Cola billboard. Of course, given that the movie's Metropolis was a blatant stand-in for New York City, and the fight took place in the equivalent of Times Square, that's exactly what you would expect to see there.
A chocolate-flavored CalorieMate Block shows up as a usable item in Metal Gear Solid 3, fully restoring Naked Snake's stamina when consumed. This is amazing, considering that the game takes place in 1964, meaning CalorieMate wouldn't even be released for almost another two decades. And why would the CIA supply their agent with a Japanese food instead of MREs?
In Mahou Sensei Negima, when Negi's party was scattered during Magic World arc, one of the few things that Chisame was able to bring with her was a CalorieMate Block she put in her robe.
- An in-story example: During the Battle of Mahora, (which almost all the students think is just a game), Chao, the arc's Big Bad pops up on the giant screens to do some Evil Gloating. After which she does an ad for the restaurant she manages.
In the Jean-Claude Van Damme/Dennis Rodman film Double Team the grand finale occurs at the Coliseum between JCVD, a tiger, land mines and Mickey Rourke. When the heroes are outrunning the explosion, the corridors of the Coliseum appear to be infested with prominently placed Coca-Cola machines, to the point the heroes weather out the worst of the blast by hiding behind one of the explosion defying machines.
Then there's the Popeye's fried chicken sponsorship in Little Nicky, which passes beyond product placement and becomes Anvilicious in its hamfistedness. In one scene, Nicky not only eats Popeyes, but says, "Man, Popeyes's is awesome!" Could it get any worse? Oh yes, it could... Nicky's love of Popeye's is integral to his defeat of the Big Bad. Cue giant walking Popeye's bucket.
- And don't forget the "change Coke into Pepsi" scene, with Nicky's roommate making a face when he tastes the "miracle".
  - All of Sandler's films have absurd levels of product placement. Eight Crazy Nights had a lengthy poem describing the brand-name stores in a mall.
ABC Daytime has a product placement deal with Campbell's that has resulted in a number of embarrassingly shoehorned references to their soup, V8 Fusion, Prego sauces, and other products on All My Children, One Life To Live, General Hospital, and, perhaps most egregiously, The View.
- General Hospital also included in 2008 an in-show plug for Acai berry juice, which is endorsed by several stars of the show, including Steve Burton, whose character drank the juice when ill and immediately felt better. Behind-the-scenes rumors suggest this was written into the story without ABC's permission and caused the show to lose Tropicana as a sponsor.
There is an embarrassingly bad example in the Night Watch movie where Anton is given a cup of Nescafe. The coffee is well lit in the foreground and takes up the whole screen. Also when a screw drops into another characters coffee cup, that is also Nestle/Nescafe.
Who can forget Kyle's Narmful love of Sour Patch Kids throughout the first season of Kyle XY? Thankfully, they eased up for season 2.
Sunrise makes the list again. Sora Wo Kakeru Shoujo had logos of its toy and music companies flying by in the first few episodes, but then comes episode 14. There's a long scene of Nina, Bou and Min eating at a Pizza Hut, with the logo in the dead center of the screen.
And Pizza Hut strikes again in the 4th season of Maria-sama Ga Miteru, where the logo is often prominently displayed in the background, even in an amusement park.
An early episode of Damages saw one character give another a gift certificate to Olive Garden, complete with the phrase "When you're here, you're family!" to the laughter of the people in the show and the groans of the people watching it. (Considering that this troper once exclaimed to his sister "We're gettin' a Dell!", he can't really complain.)
The PAL version of the Biker Mice From Mars SNES game featured a ridiculous amount of advertising for Snickers. Sure, it's made by M&M/Mars, but why the candy company in question didn't advertise their Mars bars instead is anyone's guess...
Fight Night Round 3 from EA Games has quite a bit; while usually themed with the sport (boxing), it seems a bit out of place where one cutscene is an actual ad for a Dodge of some sort. And for some reason Dodge has branched out from making things like cars to things like... um, boxing gloves?. In addition to Dodge, The Burger King is an unlockable character. Yes, that Burger King.
- Also unlockable is "Big E", the gigantic mascot for Under Armor. And his main rival, Goliath, a fat white guy who's a brazenly obvious Take That at Nike.
In Oddworld Munchs Oddysee, there are Sobe machines where you can restore your health.
In Parasite Eve II Coca-Cola was a usable item that restored 20HP and 80MP. Now only if drinks in Real Life actually healed your injuries.
Splinter Cell (you can see Sobe Adrenaline Rush vending machines in the third mission. And in the CIA, no less.).
Tony Hawk Under Ground 2 featured Butterfinger, McDonald's, and quite a few others.
Zool Ninja Of The Nth Dimension was sponsored by Chupa Chups lollipops. The first level has a "candy land" theme. One guess as to what's advertised all over the level...
It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World features numerous onscreen plugs for Coca-Cola. The scene where Buddy Hackett and Mickey Rooney fly an airplane through one of their billboards is merely the most prominent of these.
Characters in Terminator 2 can barely turn around without bumping into a Pepsi-drinker or a Pepsi vending machine.
In The Goonies, Chunk famously befriends Sloth with a Baby Ruth candy bar. There's numerous other food-and-drink related items shown, including Pepsi and Domino's Pizza.
A couple of the Kara no Kyoukai movies prominently feature Haagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream, even tying it into the character development.
Actually plot-relevant in Good Bye Lenin. The protagonist's mom was a fervent government officer from Communist East Germany, she fell into a coma after a heart attack, and the doctor told them to avoid strong emotional jolt. Only problem is, the Berlin Wall fell and Germany reunified while she was still in a coma. The whole movie is about the protagonists' attempts to hide the awful truth from his mom until her heart is in better condition. Cue a gigantic red banner that turns out to be a Coca-Cola ad being hoisted on a nearby building as the fervently Communist mom looks worried at the scene.
- The director also added that the protagonist's sister works at Burger King because that company was easier for the producers to work with for filming locations than McDonalds. The latter does maintain a Potemkin restaurant specifically for the purpose, but it's kept to the latest store model and located in City of Industry, CA. Convenient for the latest Hollywood teen flick, but for a Berlin-based production set 13 years in the past...not so much.
Deadliest Catch: The crab fishing fleet has been at sea for weeks, braving the worst that the Bearing Sea can throw at them, and everyone is still drinking their coffee out of paper Dunkin Donuts cups.
In the NCAA Football video game series, they want you to know it's sponsored by Coke Zero.
- John Madden Football includes a ton of Snickers product placement, right down to an awesome draftable rookie who just happens to have the same name as Patrick Ewing's character in their commercials. Are you ready for the CHOMPETITION?
Beloved Australian ballad Waltzing Matilda was bought from Banjo Paterson by the Billy Tea company, who changed one of the lines from "And leading a water bag" to "And waited 'til his Billy boiled" for the purposes of promoting their product. Amusingly, the second one is the better-known version.
Disney's Inspector Gadget film has Penny press a button in Gadget's car to dispense Skittles. Later after getting dropped off at home and taking a bus to Claw's office and finds the car surrounded with Skittles, saying that he has had the Skittles "knocked outta me!".
Chuck Nolan's two companions for several years on a deserted island in Cast Away are a Wilson volleyball and a FedEx package. Despite often seeming like a big advert for FedEx, the producer said it turned out to be too much hassle to figure a way to have them pay for the placement.
Pizza Hut really seems to like getting ads into as much anime as possible; in addition to Code Geass and Rebuild of Evangelion, Pizza Hut logos are a regular background feature in Darker Than Black. DtB also features huge billboards advertising the company that sponsors its webcasts, @Nifty, and has the occasional Coca Cola logo as well.

Close Food and Drink

Pizza Hut may have been removed from Code Geass, but there is still a very prominent Biglobe logo (the leading Japanese ISP) in one scene where Lelouch searches through Internet news articles to read about Zero's influence.
- Not just him, anyone surfing the web. This wasn't translated in the dub and so flew right over the American's heads.
The romantic comedy You've Got Mail takes its title from the (in)famous America Online sound bite. Aol mail is used prominently in the film itself.
Speaking of Biglobe, some (authentic looking!) computer screen closeups in the Digimon Adventure movie show Koushiro very obviously using that particular ISP to get online.
X-Play is apparently required to plug Gamefly.com Once An Episode, usually after a review of a mediocre game. They have fun with it, however, by making the segue to the plug as blatantly obvious as possible. In a recent episode, they made further fun of it — Adam begins shilling for the show's Web site, but Morgan launches into her Gamefly.com plugging by accident.
The Christmas Episode in volume 3 of Keroro Gunsou featured Keroro using the "Yahoo!" search engine. The logo was even seen in the panel.
In Disney's Inspector Gadget film, when Claw causes the billboard to fall on top of Gadget's car, we see the Yahoo! logo on it, and hear the "Yahoo-oo!" jingle (from the adverts from around the time the advert was made).

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Sometimes entire games are product placement, with the corporate Mascot as the playable character.

Cool Spot (7-up)
Avoid The Noid for the Commodore 64 and Yo!Noid for the NES (Domino's Pizza)
PEP-PEP-PEPSIMAAAAAAAN!
McDonaldland, a.k.a. MC Kids, for NES, Amiga and Commodore 64 (McDonald's) averts this somewhat, in that Ronald McDonald is only an NPC. Even still, it's a game entirely based around Product Placement: if the title didn't give it away, the fact that the Follow The Money items are the trademark golden arches should.
- There was also Mc Donald's Treasure Land Adventure for the Sega Genesis, developed by Treasure of all companies
Nearly every sports game, the "product" being the relevant organization.
The infamous Burger King games, one of which you play as the King and hide in porta-potties and trash cans to deliver hamburgers to people.
Every company that could afford it opened a video game division in the days of Atari, prior to The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983. As mentioned on that page, it got to the point where Quaker Oats had a videogame division.
Kaneko made two Chester Cheetah games for the SNES and Genesis: Wild Wild Quest and Too Cool to Fool.

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In Laguna Beach, all of the principal cast members are seen using the T-Mobile Sidekick II, and the product is also displayed prominently whenever it is used.
The Amazing Race has, on a few occasions, featured an episode where all the remaining teams are given some fancy branded cell phone for no reason other than to read a clue off of it or get a text message from home. The real reason for the phone is, of course, to say the brand name and get it on camera a lot.
- Another example was contestants getting an email from America Online.
- Or more blatantly, challenges that involve contestants not only finding the Travelocity gnome, but carrying it with them for the rest of the episode.
  - Which Travelocity turned into a commercial of its own. Wrap that one around your heads!
In Heroes, when Matt Parkman meets a mysterious African man (in Africa!), when Matt asks the man for his cellphone he says there's no service out here, then comments, "I should have gone with Sprint."
Characters on Alias all used Nokia cell phones with the "Nokia Tune" ring for the first couple of seasons. Of course, as anyone who's ever seen Trigger Happy TV knows, the correct response to that is to go "HELLO! I'm on the train! Yeah, it's really packed!"
The new Doctor Who series gave Rose Tyler a Nokia 3200 mobile phone, which was upgraded by the Ninth Doctor into a super mobile that can make phone calls through time and pick up signals where other phones can't, like other planets.
- Seeing as this is the BBC, it's more that they used a recognisable prop than it being product placement (ie: it wasn't paid for). It turns into a Samsung phone without explanation in series 2. By series 3, they at least removed the logos from Martha's phone (it's a Benq-Siemens).
- Indeed, product placement is technically illegal on the BBC; a few years ago, an episode of Spooks was temporarily pulled while they airbrushed out the Apple logo on a laptop. In the background. Because of complaints. The BBC takes its public ownership status seriously, as does the British public.
Jericho showed just how good a cell-phone company can really be: Sprint maintained service through 20 or more American cities being nuked and the resulting remnants dissolving into squabbling factions. (Sprint was a major sponsor of the show.)
The Final Fantasy movie Advent Children had some rather gratuitous close-ups of Panasonic FOMA P900iV cell phones, which at the time were available only in the movie's native Japan. Some of the usage is humorous; there's a scene where after a fight, the "Victory theme" from the game is heard... but it's the bad guy's cell phone ringtone.
- It should also be noted that this was so effective that it has created demand for this phone in regions where it will not even work as a phone due to network differences.
The Matrix Reloaded had a deal with Powerade. Thus, the characters in the movie use Samsung cell phones. (Which were specifically designed for the franchise, and were also sold to the general public.)
- The original Matrix featured Nokia phones. Although the version for the movie was customised to include a slider which would snap open; the one in real life was unfortunately not quite so cool.
Cloverfield features heavy Nokia product placement (an otherwise desolate subway room is quite on-your-face with Nokia's advertisement).
The 2008 Iron Man film has a nice close-up on the screen of Tony's Verizon phone as he's talking to Stane near the beginning.
Recent seasons of {{24}} has extensive pimping of Sprint Nextel and Palm Inc. products.
Tigh Tadhg in Ros na Rún is full of ads for Beamish. You'd think there'd be a few Guinness ads in an Irish pub.
The 2009 Star Trek reboot has kid Kirk on an in-car comm with a prominent Nokia logo on the startup screen.
And in the other direction, Sprint's ads for it's "Now Network" namedrop services like Twitter. Which makes sense, since a lot of people tweet from their phones. Mentioning specific websites to buy shoes, or saying that X amount of money generated by sales of Y is enough to build a Dunkin' Donuts...in space, not so much.
Interesting case on Lost - During the airing of the Season 3 finale, several forum posters and other live commentators pointed out how glaring the placement of Jack's Motorola RAZR phone was during his off-Island flashback, especially since Oceanic Flight 815 crashed in September 2004, years before the phone was manufactured. The end of the episode revealed that Jack's story had actually been a flashforward three years into the future, making the product placement a crafty clue.

Close Mobile Phones

If you want to make your fictional sports team more realistic, have a fictional company own the naming rights to their stadium. Nearly every venue has a corporate name.
If the old name is particularly well-loved and/or the new corporate name is particularly stupid, the old name will often remain in use by the fans. Example: ~~Progressive~~ Jacobs Field, home of the Cleveland Indians. This may be impossible to do with so many new stadiums being created that have never had anything but a corporate name, such as Petco Park in San Diego. An exception is ~~INVESCO Field at Mile High~~ Mile High Stadium in Denver.
- Occasionally, a corporate name will go over well. One example of this is "The BOB", home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Unfortunately, Bank One was bought up by Chase, so Bank One Ballpark is now Chase Field.
- The SkyDome (now Rogers' Centre) in Toronto is a very strong example: The old name was a) beloved, b) descriptive, c) unique, given the stadium's at the-time- technological novelty for being a convertable with a hard roof, and d) a contest winner. Rogers really should have called it the "Rogers Sky Dome" or something....
Aversion: Wrigley Field in Chicago. Not named after the gum company; rather, both the gum and the park are named after Phillip Wrigley, who founded the company and used to own the Cubs.
- The same is true of Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Gussie Busch actually wanted to name his park "Budweiser Stadium" but was forbidden to do so by the Commissioner of Baseball. Cue the irony. He was about three decades ahead of his time. He still got his way, indirectly. After naming his ballpark after himself, he then shortly thereafter introduced "Busch Bavarian Beer", which everyone referred to simply as "Busch".
Ironically, this is actually most prevalent in college sports. Every college bowl game has its own sponsor, though that sponsor will often change every few years.
- In the case of major games, which are identified by their original names, this is often ignored by everyone except the broadcasters, who are paid to use the "full" name of the game.
- Some of the more recent minor games have had nothing but a corporate name for the life of their existence. Sometimes this can be unwieldy, such as in the case of the Meineke Car Care Bowl. Other times, it's so smooth that it hardly sounds like a corporate bowl at all—see: Emerald Bowl (sponsored by Emerald Nuts).
- Or they go beyond unwieldy and go into the beyond absurd. Try being the MVP of the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl and not have someone think you won some made up beer league flag football tournament.
- At times, the corporate sponsor will take sole possession of the bowl's name, wiping away the old name completely. Done well, we get the likes of the Outback Bowl (formerly Hall of Fame Bowl... I think) and the Capital One Bowl (formally Citrus Bowl. It helps that Capital One puts such great effort into their ad campaigns and makes you feel like they really care about college football and are not just sponsoring a bowl in order to get their name out there.) When this is done poorly, we get the Chick-Fil-A Bowl. Up until a couple of years ago, this was another one that had both a corporate sponsor and an actual name. One of the most common sources of Dis Continuity, with fans often reverting to the old name of the Peach Bowl.
- And then there are times where the revolving door of sponsors can make this weird. When MPC Computers took their turn with the Humanitarian Bowl, they wiped out the old name completely and it became known as the MPC Computers.com Bowl. In my opinion, this sounds better than Humanitarian Bowl, and so I was quite disappointed when it became the Roady's Humanitarian Bowl last year. The MPC Computers.com Bowl was a cool, quirky name — perfect for a game played on a blue field.
- And sometimes, the company will go beyond just putting their name on the bowl and will put one of their products' names on the bowl. Like when the sponsor for the Rose Bowl was the Sony Playstation 2. Or the Fiesta Bowl was sponsored by the IBM OS/2.
The winner is the EnergySolutions Arena, home of the Utah Jazz. What does EnergySolutions do? Nuclear waste disposal, leading to such colorful nicknames as the Glow Dome, Radium Stadium, The Isotope and, the favorite of This Troper, the ChernoBowl. A local theater troupe even made a stage production about the name. Yeah, you just can't make up stuff like this.
- I dunno, the Poulan/Weed Eater Independence Bowl (yet another corporately sponsored college bowl game) has to be right up there. Or the Vitalis Sun Bowl (Vitalis is a hair tonic). Oddly, the listed corporate sponsor for the Sun Bowl under both the "Vitalis Sun Bowl" era and the (current) "Brut Sun Bowl" era is...Helen of Troy Limited. WTF?
This troper knows that various moments are brought to 'you' by certain companies. But 'This Subway (moment) is brought to you by (not-Subway company)'. They're just crammin' 'em in.
There are surprisingly few corporate-named venues in sponsor-heavy NASCAR: Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte, and the Infineon Raceway road course in Sonoma. Of course, the series themselves have corporate names: the Craftsman Truck Series, the Busch Series, and the ~~Winston~~ ~~Nextel~~ Sprint Cup, commonly called the "Cup Series" by fed-up long-time fans.
- ...and of course, each individual driver has a bevy of sponsors that cover the cars themselves.
Soccer has issues with advertising, with its large, uninterrupted stretches of play. To make up for it, product placement is absolutely everywhere.
- While most teams have a corporate sponsor right on the front of their shirt, the worst offender ever is a Welsh team that was actually called Total Network Solutions Football Club.
- The English non-league club Vauxhall Motors looks like an example, but technically isn't because it was originally the works team of the Vauxhall car factory in Cheshire.
- Not even the Americans are immune. ~~New York/New Jersey~~ Red Bulls New York, anyone? The rampant use of this in soccer is also being blamed by the American media for the spread to the WNBA, which was in turn blamed for some NFL teams putting logos on their practice jerseys — which is treated as a sign of the apocalypse despite the fact that the teams in question play in stadiums with names like "Lucas Oil Stadium".
  - Which isn't even an oil company, but makes wacky oil additive treatments designed to help you save gas mileage.
  - Speaking of which, early on the stadium was nicknamed "The Luke," but Lucas Oil wasn't happy about that since one of their competetors was LUKOIL.
Houston's Enron Field was renamed after Enron collapsed amid financial scandals. The announcement of the next sponsor mentioned the "high standards" of the selection process.
This is prevalant in Japanese sports as well. This leads to names such as Nippon Ham Fighters in Nippon Professional Baseball or All Tokyo Gas Creators in the X-League (a Japanese American football league).
As in South Korean sports, particularly baseball: all teams are owned by one of the corporate conglomerates, resulting in names like Samsung Lions, Kia Tigers, Doosan Bears, and so on.

Close Sports Stadiums/Events

Monster House has a deal with the manufacturer of "Mr. Clean" products which actually includes putting an actor dressed as Mr. Clean in shot during the "final prep" stage of each house.
Extreme Makeover Home Edition's cup runneth over with Product Placements — every little thing that goes into every house they rebuild has a brand name that is prominently displayed on-camera. Sears Roebuck in particular has a great deal with this program — in addition to frequent on-camera visits to Sears by the designers and lingering shots of Kenmore products entering the house, every episode they get a custom commercial tailored to that episode that just happens to count off each appliance, piece of furniture and even every tool used by the construction crew, under the guise of congratulating the latest recipients of ABC's weekly largesse.
Bow to Survivor, lesser reality shows, for it is king of this. Reward Challenge rewards have included camp-building supplies from Home Depot, Budweiser beer, Charmin-brand toilet paper, and so on, and so forth. And not only are the products prominently branded, but host Jeff Probst is careful to mention the brand at every opportunity. Advertisers get their money's worth from Survivor!
If it were up to the execs who broadcast American Idol, everybody would own a Ford and drink nothing but Coca-Cola all day. Mad TV spoofed the hell out of this one, using Ryan Seacrest's love for Dramatic Pauses to play the Coca-Cola commercial with Mya and Common (during the show!) over and over again.
A truly painful example comes from Who Wants To Be A Superhero, where "Erin eSurance" (the Kim Possible knock-off mascot from online insurance company eSurance) is digitally inserted into the show itself as a Voice With An Internet Connection guide to one mission. The contestants managed to be nonchalant about it, even though they were essentially getting instructions from a walking advertisement.
Obviously, any Game Show, such as The Price Is Right, that utilizes such products as prizes instead of/alongside cash.
Justified in Americas Next Top Model since the career of being a model is all about selling products. Especially Covergirl cosmetic products. Any contestant who gets their slogan wrong gets told off a lot for their lack of Genre Savvy.
The OC has several notable product placements mostly placed into conversations. While most of them can be passed off as glib references to hot new products, some are more blatant, including Sandy Cohen loudly declaring, "I'll book our flight on American Airlines right now".
Big Love included a bunch in the first episode, including a plug for Land's End delivered by the youngest boy in the family.
Home Improvement made use of this trope in the Show Within A Show "Tool Time", where Tim and Al often plugged products by the fictional Binford hardware company. One episode dealt with Tim's reluctance to promote an inferior Binford product on his show.
Smallville doesn't just pimp gum; it advertises eveything else to the point that (before he was Put On A Bus) Pete was nicknamed 'Product Placement Pete' by Television Without Pity for mentioning everything from Lemon Pledge to a shameless push of the Smallville soundtrack, in character, to boot! After he left, though, the Product Placement remained glaringly obvious, with Chloe saying things like "We'll take my Yaris." rather than "Let's use my car." and the directors seemingly going out of their way to show unnecessary close-ups of the characters' cell phones as they dial, to show off the nifty Verizon logos.
Lampshaded on the third season premire of Eureka; The new chairwoman of GD announces its first corporate sponsor, as several crates bearing Degree [the deodorant sponsoring the season] logos are wheeled in. Degree is actually sponsoring the show, insisting on heavy placement of ads and an entire upcoming episode where deodorant saves the day.
- The episode mentioned above is "Here Comes the Suns". In it, a second artificial sun created by a ten-year-old as a school science project is slowy roasting the town. Anyway, at several points the characters mention staying cool under pressure. This is the tag-line for Degree deodorant. To see one person's thoughts on this episode, go here.
An episode of WWE Raw that had a fairly drawn out skit involving Maria working out on a Bowflex in as little clothing as possible, with someone dropping by to comment on how great the Bowflex is and how it'd help to improve Maria's in ring skills. The particular was even eventually sold on WWE's website autographed by Maria! The fact that the next time something involved WWE and a Bowflex was the Chris Benoit story, though, well...
In Pokemon, James occasionally has a set of reference cards if Team Rocket happens upon a new Pokemon. When 4Kids still had the anime, they'd sometimes cut these scenes out because of potential advertisement to the card game.
- However, there's an even bigger product placement in two Sinnoh episodes—one has Meowth use a Wii Remote, and the other the Nunchuck attachment!
  - This troper would argue that was more of a throwaway joke to amuse the fans.
Michael Bay movies take a lot of heat for this. For example, the semi-futuristic film The Island features visible product placement in nearly every scene — including a (now) out-of-date Xbox logo.
The James Bond film Casino Royale was obviously sponsored by Sony, because Bond uses a Sony Ericsson cell phone, a Cybershot camera, a Walkman, a Blu-ray recorder, and a Vaio laptop.
- Not just sponsored, but produced and distributed by Sony.
- Bond also takes care to show off his watch:
  Vesper: Rolex?
  Bond: Omega.
  Vesper: Beautiful.
- Nearly every Bond movie ever made endorses specific brands of cars (Aston Martin most famously), vodka (Smirnoff), champagne (Bollinger), firearms (Walther PPK and P99) among other things.
  - Casino Royale also has silly product placement for the cars, at the time the film was made Ford owned Aston Martin (as well as Jaguar and Land Rover). As well as the near-obligatory Aston Martin, the Ford Mondeo gets prominently featured. But the worst is that nearly all the background vehicles just about everywhere seem to be shiny new Ford group cars. ISTR about the only non-new non-Ford car in the film is an old Mercedes, which naturally has a body stuffed in the boot.
Another film: Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby, which, being a NASCAR film, was chock-full of it. It was, however, taken to ridiculous heights to lampoon the whole practice (while still indulging in it), with a sportscaster noting that the title character "never met a sponsor he didn't like", and Ricky Bobby himself noting that one sponsor requires him to always mention them even in his family's mealtime prayers.
- Let us not forget that the film itself is interrupted at one point by an Applebee's commercial. Really. It Makes Sense In Context, sort of, because at that point, we're watching TV coverage of a race with Ricky and Jean-Gerard getting involved in a very long drawn-out crash.
2007's Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is rife with placement, including a Dodge logo on the nose of the Fantasticar, but it also spoofs it with Johnny's over-logoed uniform near the beginning of the film.
Will Smith's character sure loves telling people about his 'vintage 2004 Converse sneakers' in I Robot. That is far from the only product placement...
2001: A Space Odyssey was notorious not only for using Product Placement, but also for having several prominent products fail by the time 2001 rolled around.
- The Contested Sequel 2010 features an Apple //c computer and a copy of OMNI magazine, which went out of print in 1995.
Blade Runner — Atari, Pan Am, etc.
- Unintentionally subverted in that virtually every company whose logo was featured in Blade Runner tanked shortly after.
The Mothman Prophecies featured a scene, prominently featured in the TV spots and trailers, where the creepy voice on the telephone correctly guessed what the protagonist was holding in his hand. The choice of Chap Stick could work as examples of Product Placement, Narm and Nightmare Retardant.
The Back To The Future movies. Hoo boy...
- Pepsi Free (hilarious now that it's rebranded as Caffeine Free Pepsi)
- DeLorean motors — this is somewhat questionable as the DMC-12 car had been out of production and DeLorean Motors bankrupt and out of operation for two years by the time that the first film began production.
- The main theme of I and III resulted in cameo appearances by their artists (Huey Lewis in the first, ZZ Top in the 1880s doing an acoustic version of their song in III).
- Texaco comes to mind; the only location besides the courthouse that's in 1955 and 2015 Hill Valley. They would probably have worked it into III as well if the lack of gas stations in the wild west hadn't been a plot point.
  - The filmmakers say Shell actually offered them more money, but they went with Texaco instead because of how different their 1955 logo◊ looked from their 1985 logo◊.
- Calvin Klein
- Nike
- Pizza Hut
- AT & T
- Mattel
  - And despite being set in 1885, Part III managed to work in a product placement, too; the pie tin that Marty throws like a Frisbee (another trademarked item, by the way) is from the now-defunct Frisbie Pie Company. Yup, they were real.
- The film got a fair amount of money from the California Raisin Board specifically for the purpose of product placement. The film staff had promised that the film would do to California Raisins what E.T. had done to Reese's Pieces. Needless to say, the California Raisins execs weren't too happy to find that their funding only resulted in a bench (partially covered up by a sleeping hobo) with their product's name on it.
The future of Minority Report may be a grim one for those accused of crimes they haven't yet committed, but it has plenty of opportunity for The Gap, Burger King, Guinness, American Express, Aquafina, etc.
The film Ed TV, which anticipated reality television, was about a man named Ed who signed up to be on a television show that would consist of broadcasting his entire life, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As the network never interrupted the broadcast to show commercials, they made money by placing advertisements in scrolling text along the bottom of the television screen. The film itself shows these advertisements whenever a television appears, and as "EdTV" becomes more and more popular, the advertisers change, changing from local businesses to organizations with deeper pockets. By the end of the film, even "The Islands Of The Bahamas" are buying ad space on "EdTV". According to the commentary the creators were even lucky to get the organizations to allow their brand to be shown on the screen, because of the satirical stance of the movie.
Just try to put a number on the shameless product placements in Disturbia.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. The on-the-run scientist teams up with the subway-hiding Turtles to brew up some hideous looking chemical gunk to make some evil monsters go away. In a Bart Simpson's glass held very close to the camera. Thus conveying the message that Bart Simpson will change your genetic structure.
- Yellow skin, four-fingered hands, enormous eyes... makes sense to me.
The NCAA Football game series again; this time with the red-zone efficiency report brought to you by Old Spice Red Zone deodorant— "When performance matters the most!"
Any game with "licensed music".
- Guitar Hero 3 jumped in on the act too, advertising 5 Gum
  - Likewise, Guitar Hero World Tour had a massive billboard for Subway $5 footlongs on one particular venue, not to mention the venue dedicated to AT&T. It wouldn't be so bad if 5 Gum, Subway and AT&T had ANYTHING to do with music.
In Viewtiful Joe 2, when Alastor appears, he refuses to introduce himself, declaring that if you (the player) wants to know who he is, you should go pick up a copy of Viewtiful Joe (complete with a pop-in image of the game box) from your nearest Game Store's Bargain Bin. This is also a case of Lampshade Hanging and No Fourth Wall.
Inverted in Crazy Taxi: Sega had to pay to use the logos of Pizza Hut, KFC, Levi Strauss, The GAP, etc.
Super Robot Wars (any number of Merchandise Driven Humongous Mecha shows)
The Xbox 360 version of FIFA 2008 contains PlayStation 3 ads. Apparently, Sony is a FIFA sponsor, and you have to have ads of sponsors in a FIFA game. Oh, the irony.
Racing games are packed with product placement… And fans wouldn't have it any other way, since this gives you the chance to pretend you can afford to drive around in an entire garage of hopped-up cars way beyond your financial means:
- The Gran Turismo series is chock-full of in-game advertising, justified because they're the racing teams' sponsors. Example include the Audi R8 (Infineon), the JGTC Loctite Skyline, the Mercedes-Benz 190E (Hugo Boss), the Audi TT-R Touring Car (Red Bull and Walkman), the McLaren F1 GTR Race Car (Petrofina), and the BMW V12 LMR (Dell). And on top of that, there's a Gran Turismo 4 ad within Gran Turismo 4: the Playstation Pescarolo C60◊.
EA's Need For Speed franchise is one big exercise in car and music product placement. Underground 2, just to name a few, had Snoop Dogg, Mudvayne and Xzibit (while still on his Pimp My Ride fame) in the soundtrack, had some Burger Kings and Best Buys scattered around the map, and billboards from tens of advertisers all over the place.
Nintendo's 1080° Snowboarding had characters wearing brand-name clothes while riding brand-name snowboards, the sequel even had brand-name music and a music video.
Similarly, Wave Race 64 had sponsorship from Kawasaki. But interestingly enough, they didn't sign on for the rerelease on the Wii Virtual Console, which meant that all the Kawasaki ads in the game had to be replaced with ads for... the Wii.
Sonic Adventure 2 replaces Sonic's trademark shoes with a pair from the brand Soap. And yes, there are Soap Shoes ads in quite a few of the levels.
- It should be noted that Soap shoes aren't really normal shoes, they've got a sideways bite out of the sole so that you can “grind” on railings and stuff, which was exploited as a gameplay mechanic. Later games gave Sonic his old shoes back but kept the grinding move.
Splinter Cell uses Sam Fisher's electronic organizers to place products. The first game, for example, gave him a Palm OPSAT, while the second game gave him a Sony Ericsson phone.
Pikmin 2 was full of brand-name products, though in this case, it helped add realism. On the other hand, Olimar and the ship were somewhat more likely to say something positive about a treasure that had a logo on it...
- Hey, if it gives me Pikmin 3, who cares?
- Similarly, Super Monkey Ball 2 doesn't just have plain bananas like in Donkey Kong Country - they're all Dole bananas, complete with sticker.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Snake has an iPod, the unbranded "book" of previous games is now a Playboy, and at one point Otacon breaks the fourth wall to talk up the PS 3's Blu-ray drive.
- It doesn't end there. Several other products are prominently displayed, including Sony Ericsson phones, Re Gain energy drinks, and as a friendly Shout Out to their competitor Ubisoft, you can unlock Altair's costume from Assassin's Creed for camoflauge. Don't even bother trying to count all the Apple logos in Otacon's Hacker Cave.
  - Somewhat subverted as in one of the MGS 4 INTEGRAL podcasts in-game, they admitted that the developers didn't want a generic MP 3 player. At least, according to the yanks.
  - Also, don't you think there's something just a little bit interesting about having Snake whore out Apple products?
Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire on the Nintendo 64 contains a bit of product placement to itself, of all things: during the mission inside the frieghter the Suprosa, when Dash locates the supercomputer containing the new Death Star plans, it will greatly resemble an N64 with a Shadows cartridge plugged in if viewed from a sufficient distance.
City Of Heroes recently introduced "optional in-game advertising" which replaces some of the fictional advertisements found throughout the city with those of real products. At the time of this writing, only one real advertisment is available: a giant picture of a shoe with the words "Jeter Clutch" above and to the left of it.
- Unlike in most cases, most fans are all for this. Ads = Money = Game will continue to be developed. Unfortunately, most companies seem reluctant to jump on this.
The protagonist of the Pokemon games has Nintendo's current TV-gaming-system in his room. Ranging from Super Nintendo, over the N64 and the Gamecube to the Wii.
Battlefield 2142 has billboards on many of its maps, served with real ads like a 3D-rendered page banner. The ads were targeted, so each player would see something different in the same space. Penny Arcade makes light of it here.
Meta? One of the goals in Goldeneye 64 is a security tape. In a box. Looking at the tape in your inventory will reveal it spinning, like many objects. The front is a promo for the Goldeneye movie. True, they did have the rights to the image...but it still spins this troper's brain.
KateModern contains frequent product placement. In most cases it serves to make the show more realistic, although in the case of Tampax, it became a little odd (who makes a video about the brand of tampon they use?). Then there's "Skittle Yourself", which actually asks viewers to create their own Skittles adverts and put them online. Go on, it'll be fun!
The directory inquiries service 118 118 has a daily advert in British newspaper Metro in the form of a short comic strip. Bizarrely, many of these strips feature blatant plugs for other products -product placement in an advertisment. And yes, this means there are now ads inside of other ads.
One e-trade commercial has the man onscreen state that he made enough money using the service to buy seven monitors; six to watch the market, and one to "regulate chumps in Gears Of War."
A Kellogg's SmartStart Healthy Heart features women doing healthy things like yoga, exercising, and playing Wii Sports.
Yamaha is one of the main sponsors of Nodame Cantabile. Consequently, every piano in that show is a Yamaha and melodicas are referred to as "pianicas".
And Yamaha once again masters this trope through their new hit "Vocaloid" software; a singing synthesizer that can mimic various kinds of voices, male and female, which just takes entering lyrics and melodies. Each voice comes with its own cute mascot embodiment that just begs for its own anime, making it a virtually infinite doorway of product placement.
Toy Story features several real toys as its characters.
- The toys that weren't currently in production at the time of the movie were quickly made available again to cash in on the massive success of the movie and best of all, Mattel didn't let Pixar use Barbie in the first movie, thinking it would flop. 4 years later, Barbie featured prominently in Toy Story 2.
Yes Man has the main character Carl order a Temperpedic mattress and do the wine test vigorouslyon it, order a Rolling Rock beer, speed by a UPS truck, and rent the movies 300 and Transformers from Blockbuster.
- He also rambles for a bit about how much he likes Red Bull now that he's had his first one, and several characters discuss the advantages of a Costco membership card.
Older Than You Think: the 1949 Marx Brothers film Love Happy (their final film) has a chase scene (and gags) around a series of billboards for various products of the era, including Harpo escaping his pursuers by riding the neon image of Mobil Oil's Flying Red Horse. Check it out.
Drac's Night Out, a never-released game dug out from its grave by The Angry Video Game Nerd, used Reebok shoes as a powerup. The Nerd took this to its natural conclusion with a mock ad for said shoes, because you're shit without them.
In The Urbz for console, the eagle-eyed player could easily spot branded Red Bull machines in certain locales. Admittedly, a coffee cart would be tough to find in a dirty subway or the equally-dirty alleyway outside a biker bar, but this is too much. Perhaps presence of The Black Eyed Peas music would also count, exacerbated/mitigated by them being CHARACTERS IN THE GAME!
Tropic Thunder has a movie agent playing Wii Sports one-handed throughout a rather long phone call.
While we don't get paid for it, this very wiki is not immune to it, with product names creeping into trope titles—sometimes justified when talking about tropes that have to do with brand names, but often just because. (That last one, in particular, could've easily been made generic.) One company even got two tropes named after it for no apparent reason besides Rule Of Funny.
Basquash, by its nature as a basketball-playing humongous mecha series, has a deal with Nike, to the point where a Nike logo is prominently displayed in the opening sequence.
Snakes On A Plane is positively rife with placements - a character quickly chugs a can of Red Bull, placing the empty can directly in front of the camera before driving off on his bike with very obvious Kawasaki logo in the first few scenes; several characters are shown with high tech objects like laptops including a screen-filling apple logo), PS Ps and Nintendo D Ses; and the movie climaxes in a scene in which the plots resolution is directly linked to one character's gaming past.
Air Marshal Flynn: All prasies to the Play Station!
The futuristic racer Extreme-G 2 featured billboards for Diesel clothing in the city track.
Hip-hop's over-reliance on product placement has become a point of embarassment for some fans and artists. It's nothing new, what with Run-DMC's "My Adidas" coming out in 1985, but some rappers avoid it entirely while others live for it, not even getting paid for the brand-dropping. Interestingly, some companies (like high-end wine makers and pistol manufacturers) have expressed disdain for the practice, not wanting their product associated to something as crass and low-brow as the type of rap likely to do it.
The website of Gaia Online frequently accepts sponsorships from bigger corporations to help keep their servers running, which in return get to advertise to Gaia users, usually by offering promotion items to users who watch an advertisement. A lot of Gaia, particularly the GCD, complains about this. Biggest "offenders" are:
- Skittles, who did a flood of games with Skittles-based prizes (including prized heterochromia eyes), sponsored an entire dance venue at the 2009 prom event, and occasionally take over Daily Chance.
- MTV, who sponsor a gold store run by an NPC who is supposedly an extra from their show The Hills, in addition to the "watch an ad for this show/movie, get an item" route.
- OmniDrink, full stop. Oh, wait, April Fools'...
- Verizon, who stuck a "message in a bottle" minigame into everybody's Aquariums. They're also chief sponsors of the Cinema feature.
  - In fact, Gaia is known for it's utterly bizarre product placement at times. A female only environment dedicated to leg razors (saved primarily due to massive amounts of Estrogen Brigade Bait), a flash environment with a stealth deodorant ad you wouldn't even notice if you weren't paying attention, a temporary shop containing only three pieces of formalwear that vanished about a month before the actual prom event began, and those ads for Monster Learning that keep popping up and bugging everyone every so often. The reasoning for the occasional oddities in sponsorships lies in the fact that Advertising Agencies decide what Gaia will advertise at any given time. When a new company starts doing business with Gaia, they typically give them a throwaway brand to advertise. As a result, users see announcements for the crappy products before they can see the good stuff. The upside to all of this sponsorship frenzy is that Gaia doesn't have to rely on parody to give users long requested cosplay items, like Hogwarts Robes, or Sparkly Vampire Skin.

Alright, Your Milage May Vary on that last one...

The Sims 2: IKEA Home Stuff, full stop.
- Earlier than that, H&M Fashion Stuff.
"Mr. Monk and the UFO" was sponsored by Sleep Inn and featured a scene where Monk was returning to the hotel room in which he was staying with only one bag of cleaning supplies. Natalie reassured a hotel employee that having only one bag was like giving the hotel five stars.
Devil May Cry 2 has alternate costumes that were based on actual brand clothing designed by a company called Diesel, which helped promote the game in Japan.

Close Anything and Everything

The music video to the Clazziquai song "Flea" has several shots of a PSP running DJMAX Portable Clazziquai Edition. It gets a little surreal when you play the song in-game or on DJMAX Technika.
Rap videos can be really bad with this. Several, such as "Pass the Courvasier" by Busta Rhymes and "Air Force Ones" (about a brand of basketball shoes) by Nelly are basically 4-minute, unpaid commercials. In fact, many fine wine makers don't like the publicity from mainstream rap; half out of snobbiness, half out of concern that it promotes underage drinking.

Close Music Videos

Two recent Sprint commercials have made fun of this, presenting their commercials for the Instinct phone as movie trailers. They're actually called something like "the finest product placement movie this summer", with "finest" often replaced for a more genre-approriate word (such as "scariest" or "heartwarming").

Close Advertising

In the DC Comics series 52, Booster Gold, a superhero with a reputation for being self-interested, tools around Metropolis with a dozen logo decals stuck to his costume. (He later learns his lesson. And then explodes. But gets better.)
Transmetropolitan parodied this. At one point, the main character, Spider Jerusalem, very newsworthy, goes on a booze fueled rant. As shown in other points, one can clearly click over to buy the booze Spider is holding as he does his thing. In another aspect, Spider, naive to the ways of City life, is hit with an advertising bomb that unloads ads in his sleep. Society isn't completely insane; chemically induced ad visions cause mucho nuerological disasters and are illegal...until they aren't for about five minutes every few legal cycles. Guess what the citizens get sprayed with then? And last but not least, the TVs in your home don't seem to have an off switch...
- Spider's TV might be an exception, though. He explicitly programs it to change channels every twenty seconds in the first issue and leaves it on. Constant information overload probably goes with the territory of being a journalist.

Close Comic Books

Foxtrot parodied this once.
Paige: I hate how the American Idol judges always have those Pepsi cans in front of them.
Peter: It's called product placement, Paige.
Paige: Well, it's tacky.
Peter: Get used to it. Altoid Mint?
Paige: Yes, thanks! They're Curiously Strong!

Close Newspaper Comics

The Truman Show had the protagonist's wife constantly hocking merchandise, not to mention every single inanimate object in the “world” being product placement. It takes a dark turn near the end, as she does it at the wrong moment — Truman, who's beginning to work out the truth, hisses, "What are you saying?" and attacks her.
- There were also two guys whose entire job on the Truman Show was to stop Truman at a place, frame him properly for a camera to include a shot of a certain poster for a few seconds, then let him go. Other product-based oddities abounded in the world as well.
Spoofed brilliantly in the movie Waynes World, as Wayne and Garth rant about not selling out and staying true to themselves, while showing off various products.
In Return Of The Killer Tomatoes, breaking the Fourth Wall, the director appears to informs the characters that there isn't enough money to finish the film. He blames the (relentlessly) generic products that have been shown throughout the movie to that point. After that, logos appear on various objects and all dialog is loaded with ever-more-blatant product pitches, only ending when a character breaks down mid-spiel and asks "do we have enough money to finish this turkey yet?" The director stops partying with hookers long enough to give the go-ahead.
From Kung Pow Enter The Fist — "Taco Bell, Taco Bell, Product Placement for Taco Bell..."
- Na-na-na, na, na...Neo...Na-na-na, na, na...sporin!
A series of "Turn off your damn mobile phone" trailers in the United Kingdom from the Orange Film Funding Board showed various celebrities pitching ideas to the board. It then showed a panel of execs, mangling whatever idea they are given to include mobile phone product placement, ending with the line "Don't let a mobile ruin your movie". Ironically, Orange actually went on to fund one of the joke stories because they liked the idea, hence all the mobile usage in A Cinderella Story.
- Probably the best of these so far was a high-budget example, where Stephen Seagal approaches the golfing execs with an idea for a romcom, and the execs retort that he only knows how to do action. Seagal chases after the chief exec insisting it can be done, but the irony is that he's chasing him in a very action-movie fashion, only transposed to a golf course (beating up minions, a car chase in golf carts). There's the obligatory phone bit, but it ends with Seagal blowing up the exec's helicopter just after he dismisses the idea for the last time.
In Mel Brooks' Spaceballs, Product Placement is merged with the Hollywood Merchandising Machine to create a brilliant parody: All the products featured bear the movie's logo. Spaceballs The Doll. Spaceballs The Bedsheet. Spaceballs The Breakfast Cereal. Spaceballs The Flame Thrower... and so forth. Perhaps ironically, Spaceballs The Lunchbox is just a Transformers lunchbox with a Spaceballs logo taped on it.
- The tie-ins are clearly intended as a jab at the extensive merchandising around the Star Wars license.
  - It was revealed in a 20th anniversary magazine that Mel Brooks actually had George Lucas' blessing to parody Star Wars (which explains why Brooks was never sued by Lucasfilm) — on the one condition that there be absolutely zero merchandising of the film. Therefore, the ridiculous product placement of (non-available) Spaceballs merchandise was intended to tweak Lucas' nose over this.
  - The other reason Brooks was never sued was that Spaceballs was a parody that's protected under the first amendment, making getting Lucas' blessing completely unneeded, but hey!
Captain Amazing, from Mystery Men, is a commercially-sponsored hero, his entire costume covered in advertising logos. (This was in 1999, eight years before the Fantastic Four gag above.)
It was noted that there was a tremendous amount of product placement in the Arnold Schwartzenegger film Total Recall, especially in the middle of the city square. It makes fun of this a bit when the main character is on Mars, and a "USA Today" newspaper vending machine appears, only the label says "Mars Today" and is in red instead of USA Today's blue.
In another Ahnold movie, Last Action Hero, at one point the car crashes through a semi-truck clearly labeled "Coca-Cola", which is driving out of what appears to be the bottling plant.
The Adventures of Rocky And Bullwinkle (you know, The Film Of The Series, which doesn't exist?) mocks this trope, excepting when making sure the audience knows that the characters use Hewlett-Packard computers.
Harold And Kumar Go to White Castle. Note for non-Americans: White Castle is a restaurant chain in the US.
In Desperately Seeking Susan Rosanna Arquette takes a drag from a cigarette, and then starts coughing. The cigarette company that paid for the placement demanded their money back.
In all of Quentin Tarantino's movies where a character smokes, they'll smoke Red Apple brand cigarettes. Being a fictional brand, it sure pops up a lot. Same is true with the Big Kahuna Burger Chain (though the latter is tempered by how one of the most famous scenes in his oeuvre is a discussion of McDonald's).
- He does feature real cereal brands, like "Fruit Brute" and "Kaboom". Both haven't been produced since the 70s.
In Evolution, the protagonists discover than the alien menace can be killed by selenium. When they wonder where they are going to get several hundred gallons of it, a couple of slacker students reveal that Head & Shoulders conatins selenium sulfide as the active ingredient. Thus, they fill a fire truck with the stuff and use it to save the day. It's done so tongue in cheek (the movie is a comedy) that it's obviously a parody and it culminates with the characters making a faux ad for Head & Shoulders at the very end of the film (supposedly this was suggested by the director's son).
- Also, chemistry enthusiasts may know that selenium sulfide is used in virtually all dandruff shampoos, not just head & Shoulders.
'''Ira Kane: Wow, fighting the alien menace can be tough work.
Harry Block: And so is keeping your hair clean, shiny and dandruff free.
Wayne Grey: SO it's a good thing we always keep a healthy supply of [all join in], Head and Shoulders, around the house. (Played right before end credits, the three holding the product - one of them backwards).
Hilariously averted, to the point of parody, in Repo Man. Not only are no products placed, but every commercial product seen has an ultra-generic label, from the can of "Food" Otto eats from in his parents' house to the "Beer" he pours on the floor of the repossession office, to every labeled item on the shelves of the grocery and liquor stores. The only brand names explicitly used in the entire movie are (unavoidably) those of cars slated for reposesssion, and the vehicles in question look like such crap, it's more a Take That than a product promotion. Lampshaded when another character offers to buy Otto a drink, and the very next shot shows them purchasing a six-pack of "Drink".
One of Wayne Knight's lines in the movie Space Jam contains SIX product placements, all for items that lead character Michael Jordan has appeared in commercials for:

"Get your Hanes on, lace up your Nikes, grab your Wheaties and your Gatorade, and we'll pick up a Big Mac on the way to the Ball park!"

Close Film

Arrested Development: Two characters meet at Burger King and discuss how a show within a show is getting a big endorsement from the restaurant for mentioning its name. Naturally, the conversation itself features the characters repeatedly saying the name "Burger King" and hawking the restaurant's services like free drink refills, until even the narrator joins in. Indeed, the writers originally were going to call this episode "Tendercrisp Chicken Comedy Half-Hour," after the sandwich heavily advertised in background signage.
The 30 Rock episode "Jack-Tor", in which the characters' dealt with product placement on the Show Within The Show, cleverly lampshaded the use of product placement on the actual show.
Jack: These Verizon Wireless phones are just so popular, I accidentally grabbed one belonging to an acquaintance.
Liz: Well, sure, 'cause that Verizon Wireless service is just unbeatable. I mean, if I saw a phone like that on TV, I'd be, like, "Where is my nearest retailer so I can get one?" [looks straight into the camera] Can we have our money now?
- Other products that are "Product Placed" on 30 Rock include Snapple and the Suggie.
Liz: It's not product placement, i just like how it feels!
Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge spoofs the levels that some television personalities will stoop too to shill products; every episode featured the host, Alan Partridge, hawking cheap tat with a complete lack of subtlety. However, as Alan worked for The BBC — which takes quite a dim view of these kind of practices, being a public broadcaster with strict rules about this sort of thing — this gradually became a plot point; the Christmas Special focused heavily on Alan's increasingly feeble attempts to discretely sell Rover cars under the nose of his savvy boss, who was a guest on the same show.
Top Gear parodied the concept a couple of times, always starting off with a Lampshade Hanging citing BBC policy which prohibits advertising:
- In one episode, Top Gear managed to borrow a Ferrari Enzo from Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, but only under the condition that they plug his book. Jeremy Clarkson then mentions that he told Mason they couldn't do that, but he'll "slide in a couple of references no one will notice". The review segment had Jeremy Clarkson interviewing Nick Mason while both of them are holding the book, in a slightly forced, exaggerated and stereotypical manner not unlike the most blatant plugs on a TV program. Clarkson also used references to Pink Floyd albums in his review of the Enzo, and the Stig had the car's stereo playing Another Brick in The Wall, Part II while he did the hot lap. At the end of the day, Top Gear managed to review the Enzo, Mason got his book plugged, and the audience gets a good laugh out of the blatant product placement on television, everybody wins! Yay Top Gear!
- When they did the 24-hour Britcar race, they weren't allowed to have sponsor decals on their car. Instead, they added logos of made-up sponsors Larsen's Biscuits and Penistone Oils, with Clarkson saying they wanted to "look more authentic." Top Gear being Top Gear, they "accidentally" placed the decals in such a way that if the car's doors were swung open, the letters would read "Arse Biscuits" and "Penis". Throughout the segment the team was shown talking while resting their elbows on the car's open doors for the purposes of "sponsor airtime".
- In true Top Gear fashion, during the wide shot where we can see the "offending" words, Richard Hammond says "I want people to take us seriously."
One episode of A Bit Of Fry And Laurie was filled with references to something called "Tidyman's Carpets", in the most ham-fisted way possible.
Fry: Hello, and welcome to "A Bit of Fry and Tidyman's".
Parodied by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report: His coverage of his own 2008 presidential run was "sponsored by Nacho Cheese Doritos", although Frito-Lay never actually paid him for it, and he spent several months mentioning the iPhone at every possible opportunity in the hope that Apple would send him one for free. Apple did.
- Initially, his campaign was "sponsored by Nacho Cheese Doritos", until it was pointed out that Federal election laws forbid direct sponsorship of political campaigns in return for advertising plugs (although more than one wag has stated they should be mandatory since that would make it transparent who's giving money to a particular candidate...)
- He's also been hawking various products recently, including Ax Body Spray, the character having sold his soul to various corporations in order to get sponsorship that will keep the show going in light of the financial meltdown.
- His habit of drinking Sierra Mist, however, is not product placement. It is just the best way to quench your thirst. Ahhh.... refreshing Sierra mist.
In a recent episode of How I Met Your Mother they featured toys and movies posters heavily for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The posters were not commented on, however they made great use of the toy Wolverine claws in several scenes.
In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, John Henry loved to play with his Bionicles toys. He would also frequently tell other characters about the mythology of the Bionicle world.
In the Groundhog Day episode of Stargate SG-1 Colonel O'Neill and Teal'c hit golfballs through the stargate with name-brand golf equipment prominently displayed. Rule Of Cool win.
- Stargate SG-1 is guilty of this extremely subtly, as Samantha Carter is always seen either using a Dell Inspiron laptop or, in the later seasons, a Dell XPS laptop.
HBO occasionally has a character in their series watching a scene from an another HBO series. For example, in The Wire, Omar watched Oz and Cutty's roommate watched Deadwood. There's also a scene where Dukie is about to plug Dexter but is interrupted by Michael Lee.
Myth Busters genericies any products it uses (except for a few cases, such as Mentos and Diet Coke for the Mentos and Diet Coke myth) by using blurring or sleeves with the Mythbusters logo, and occasionally has short segments endorsing "blur" or "Mythbusters" brand products.
Given the predominance of Product Placement in the current media landscape, most assume that Seinfeld just did it to get money. Acually, the Product Placement in Seinfeld broke a lot of sitcom etiquette by actually mentioning specific products, and the writers had to lobby for permission to use the names of real products. Why? The Contemplating Our Navels conversations that Seinfeld is famous for are based on Real Life diction, and such diction is extremely clunky to recreate with an abstract Brand X. As an example, one episode involves George Costanza attempting to prove that someone took his candy bar impugning a suspect's description of candy bars. By using actual candy bars, the viewer can base her own experiences with that candy bar in interpreting how the characters on screen react to it. The incidental Product Placement in Seinfeld is actually a large reason why Product In Placementin general has become so popular in the modern age. Prior to Seinfeld, ad executives were far more worried about negative association than, in retrospect, they should have been.

Close Live Action TV

Love Aikawa from Bleach was once reading a Shonen Jump issue. The funny thing is that Bleach is published by Shonen Jump.
- Similarly Gintama has had entire plots revolving around Jump. The series is so weird this gets a pass though.

Close Manga and Anime

Deus Ex: The description for the soda is "The can is blank execpt for the phrase ´PRODUCT PLACEMENT HERE.´ It is unclear whether this is a name or an invitation."
Mario Kart seems to enjoy mocking this trope, as most courses are covered with ads...for nonexistent businesses, some more blatant parodies of real-world companies than others.
- The Japanese release of Mario Kart 64 even had Bland Name Product ads for Mariobro (Marlboro), Luigip (Agip), Yoshil (Mobil), and Shell (with a Koopa shell).
In the Crapsack World RPG Underground, product placement has become so blatantly ubiquitous that embedded ads can be found in constitutional amendments.
In Backyard Basketball, Barry DeJay endorses 110% Juice (a fictional comnpany), and the MVP is the 110% Juice Player of the Game. 110% Juice is even a powerup in the game.

Close Video Games

For a brief while, John Campbell claimed that pictures for sad children was being sponsored by the Long John Silver's restaurant chain. He made these two pages during that time, and for the duration of the joke, the pages in question were colored blue and yellow and the plain white background of the website was replaced with a splash ad for LJS.

Close Webcomics

This Zero Punctuation episode.
Italian Spiderman parodies this trope, with the "Il Gallo" (a fictional label, mind you) cigarettes often smoked by the main character — he even blatantly exhibits them during one episode.
The Irate Gamer: In his Yo! Noid review, he notes at the beginning that the game's developer sold out by making a bad game based on a Domino's Pizza mascot. As he reviews the game, he wonders why Domino's would do such a thing. He then gets a check from Domino's and decides that selling out isn't a bad thing and starts promoting and namedropping random products ("After all, a logo can go a long way.") while praising the game. He finally stops when he sees how bad the ending is and decides that he’ll only sell out to himself.
Speaking of Domino's
Close Web Original

In an episode of Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law, Harvey Birdman's drink suddenly turns into a can of Tab. Then there is an extended live-action sequence where Birdman and a 5-foot can of Tab frolic on the beach.
In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the main characters are wandering through a Nevada desert until they find a Wal-Mart smack dab in the middle of it. When D.J. Drake (Brendan Fraser) remarks how stupid it is, his "love interest" studio executive Kate Houghton (Jenna Elfman) simply replies "Product Placement. No one notices that anymore" and no one else cares, since they are thirsty and tired. When they leave, they are loaded with stuff and Bugs Bunny says "It was very nice of Wal-Mart to give us all of these Wal-Mart products for saying "Wal-Mart" so many times."
A few episodes of Sealab 2021 are choked with fake ads for Grizzlebee's, a riff on Applebee's, TGI Friday's, and other US-based "down-home neighborhood family restaurant" franchises. "Grizzlebee's: You'll wish you had less fun!"
- And at that, the episode "Tinfins" was itself one long advertisement for a fake movie, interspersed with advertisements for a fake restaurant.
The Josie And The Pussycats movie gleefully used hyperbole to show how absurd product placement can become. Examples include an advert for Evian mineral water on an underwater wall in an aquarium, and a giant McDonald's 'M' on the World Trade Center. Plus, if this troper recalls correctly, ads on the wall of a hotel SHOWER. (Creepy). The plot itself featured the titular girlband (unwittingly) playing subliminal adverts in their music as part of the villains scheme to brainwash teenagers into buying more stuff.
Futurama made a few jokes mocking this by putting advertising in dreams and also with Nixon's repeated shilling for "Charleston Chew" during his speeches.
The Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Boost Mobile" revolves around the title brand of cell phone, but with more than ehough Adult Swim-style self-conscious mockery.
- "Hey, homie, where you at? THE WHOLE CITY'S BEHIND US!"
American Dad parodies it in "Black Mystery Month", when Steve and Stan stop at a Burger King:
Steve: Why did we have to come to a Burger King to read the map?
Stan: Because the economics of television have changed! (awkwardly) Have it...your way!
An episode of Arthur had Francine filming a music video. When asked why she put a bottle of tomato ketchup on top of a tombstone, she explained it was product placement.

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