by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Coke drinkers are normal, Pepsi drinkers troll for greasy Mexican homosexuals. Is that the real message behind Brokeback Mountain?

Concordia media studies prof Matthew Soar doesn’t think so, but some not-so-subtle product placement in last year’s critical darling might encourage less savvy viewers to get that idea, at least on an unconscious level. He points to the scene where Heath Ledger’s character Ennis is eating apple pie at a diner, and unexpectedly meets his former girlfriend and her new man.

“Behind her is this massive Coke machine, it’s huge, it’s shiny, it’s red, and it’s beautifully lit, like it’s surrounded by a giant halo,” he says.

Contrast that with the scene in which Jack, Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, drives through a shabby Mexican town along a street lined with hustlers—who are standing near a Pepsi logo. Bang: instant negative placement. Coke is angelic and American, Pepsi is tawdry and foreign.

Dumb down, pay up

Soar has been tracking product placements in movies and television for three years, and recently set up his Web site, www.brandhype.org, to point out some of the more egregious examples. Estimated as being worth some $3.6-billion (U.S.), according to advertising trade mag Madison+Vine, the product placement industry is big business. Over the past 15 years, says Soar, it’s accelerated rapidly, to the point where Los Angeles advertising agencies are dedicating staff full time to tracking scripts in circulation and looking for suitable opportunities to show off their products.

“Movies are increasingly being written for product placement,” says Soar, a 40-year-old British ex-pat with a background in advertising and graphic design. “Sometimes it involves payment, other times it’s just mutually beneficial for both parties.”

He points to Cast Away, the 2000 Tom Hanks movie that essentially becomes a two-and-a-half-hour long ad for FedEx. The courier company supplied the plane, costumes, equipment and more in return for global—and positive—brand exposure (Hanks’s character delivers the parcel in the end). That kind of relationship, says Soar, is growing because it works.

“It’s most often seen in kids’ movies and high-end action movies,” he says, because big-budget Hollywood films are targetting teenagers. He notes that movies by explosion king Michael Bay (The Island, Armageddon) seem especially fertile ground for product placement. Sequels and popular TV series also tend to be product-heavy.

“Once advertisers know that a show is working and that an audience is coalescing around it, placements rack up,” he says. That’s why every time Tony Soprano opens his fridge, viewers will see a box of Tropicana on the top shelf, and, in the last episode of Six Feet Under, Claire drives off in search of her destiny behind the wheel of a Prius.

While sneaky and annoying, this kind of advertising, Soar says, is also hurting the filmmaking process. “I’m sure it’s having an effect,” he says. “I have no hard evidence, because I’m not a social scientist, but having thought about this for a number of years, my sense is that it’s detrimental to the process, because more and more scripts are being written to accommodate the process.”

Logo love

But what bothers Soar more than the ever-growing list of shitty movies is the lack of discussion surrounding the issue. He points to www.brandchannel.com, a Web site that bills itself as the only one exclusively dedicated to the discussion of branding. On Feb. 27, they ran “brandchannel’s 2005 Product Placement Awards,” in which they gushingly celebrate the greatest examples in last year’s movies. The winner of the Brandcameo 2005 Award for Overall Product Placement was Ford, whose brand appeared in “nearly 50 per cent of all Number One films (41 total).”

“They say they’re the only Web site in the world to provide a forum for discussing branding, but you have to e-mail your question, and then it’s edited and then it’s placed,” says Soar. “But it’s always questions like, ‘Is Sony making a mistake with its branding?’ There are no dissenting voices.”

Soar acknowledges that to date, product placement has been mostly confined to Hollywood. But as the practice proves increasingly viable and mutually profitable, he believes it’s just a matter of time before viewers in Canada, Europe, India or anywhere else with a viable film industry start seeing logos appearing in their local TV shows and films.

“At the end of the day, maybe, maybe, maybe there’s an argument that can be made for it, if it’s done subtly,” says Soar. “Or maybe not. But let’s at least have that conversation.”