Under the Spotlight: how the Lumiére brothers pioneered cinema and product placement at the same time
Product placement in movies is a nasty, shameless business. It’s also an integral part of the industry’s financial structure. When you see a couple in a film having an argument over a kitchen table with a cereal box planted at the centre of the frame or a young girl using her telekinetic powers to move a can of Coca-Cola, you’re watching the outcome of extensive negotiations and millions of dollars.
Sometimes, product placement is as blatant and alienating as a commercial break. In other cases, it’s done so cleverly that you might not even realise it’s happening. Think of the volleyball in the 2000 Tom Hanks movie Cast Away. The protagonist doesn’t just create a face out of a bloody handprint on the inanimate sporting object; he names it Wilson after the manufacturer. 25 years later, you can still buy an exact replica of that ball from the Wilson website.
Then, there are the instances where product placement creates a royal uproar over pretty much nothing. When it was announced that James Bond would be cracking open a Heineken in 2012’s Skyfall, fans went (to use the technical term) berserk. How could a character with such a famous martini order possibly drink anything else? There aren’t many alcohol drinkers who steadfastly imbibe one type of beverage in every single situation, but that was beside the point.
When people saw the actual offending scene of blatant greed, it was so quick and unobtrusive that they might have missed it altogether. In contrast, the amount of money that switched hands was anything but negligible. Heineken allegedly paid MGM $45 million for the spot, accounting for almost half the film’s budget.
You might think that product placement is a modern invention, like low-carb diets and the dark web, but if you want to trace it all the way back to its origins, you have to look at the birth of cinema itself.
If you take an introductory class on the history of filmmaking (or do a quick web search, for that matter), the Lumiére brothers will be inescapable. Auguste and Louis invented the cinématographe motion picture system, which they used to create movies in the late 1890s and early 1900s. When they premiered several of their short films for a small paying audience in 1895, it marked the beginning of cinema. For obvious reasons, they are usually celebrated as pioneers of the medium, but they also deserve the credit or blame for kicking off the use of product placement.
Six months after the brothers cut the proverbial ribbon on cinema, they partnered with Swiss businessman François-Henri Lavanchy-Clarke, who was a distributor and marketer of the soap company Lever Brothers (now known as Unilever, which owns everything from Dove to Ben & Jerry’s). The resulting film, Washing Day in Switzerland, was only 40 seconds long but displays the French and German versions of the Lever brothers’ Sunlight Soap. Shortly thereafter, they made the film Défilé-du-8e-bataillon, a one-minute film that features a hand cart with the Sunlight Soap logo prominently on display. Lavanchy-Clarke himself was the one pushing the cart.
The Lumiéres weren’t the only ones. Thomas Edison, a chief technological rival of the brothers, jumped on the bandwagon. With financial stakes in a wide range of companies, he used his films to promote everything from railways to phonographs. When the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony kicked off in 1929, the film that won the first-ever award for ‘Best Picture’, William Wellman’s Wings, featured a prominent shot of the Hershey’s chocolate logo.
By modern standards, these early examples are pretty tame. 2013’s The Internship, for example, is basically just a two-hour Google advertisement masquerading as an Owen Wilson comedy, while the 1993 Sylvester Stallone flick Demolition Man imagines a world in which Taco Bell is the only restaurant on planet Earth. If you feel like product placement has gotten significantly more aggressive lately, you’re correct. Now that people are spending more time watching ad-free streaming services than network television, brands are paying big money to insert themselves into movies and shows without relying on commercial breaks.
These days, product placement accounts for more than $23 billion, according to the New York Times. For better or for worse, we have the Lumiéres, at least in part, to thank for it.
