Ad infinitum: Co-branded advertising, from Star Wars to The Incredibles
I am officially beginning the writing phase of this research project, and so have returned to where I first ended up, with a complete proposal to hand in to the Haas Scholars committee. One can never be sure if one's blog is ever actually read, but I thought I would reproduce in part the original research proposal. Reading it now, I'm struck by how much things have changed, while still remaining essentially the same. I had at first thought that "children's film" would be a major component of the research, and now it seems less so. I had also thought that Thomas Frank's book, The Conquest of Cool, would provide an invaluable model for interpreting co-branded advertising. Now I am considering Frank, along with Mark Crispin Miller and Michael Schudson, but taking for my interpretative model Thomas More's Utopia and the litotes, a Greek rhetorical figure of speech.
Even these precious thoughts of antiquity are subject to radical change, and who knows where I will end up, in the end?
Below is the text. For time and all eternity. On the web.
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Co-branded advertising is a movie marketing strategy pairing films like Star Wars (1977) and E.T. (1982), with brands such as Burger Chef and Atari, respectively. This advertising differs from traditional film marketing, in so far as it explicitly adopts the language of the product advertisement, and not the movie trailer. Co-branded advertising has so charmed the American film industry, that in 2004 the Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards, which annually recognizes excellence in the field of movie marketing, added a category honoring co-branded audio/visual content. The aim of my project is to determine the conventions and implications of co-branded advertising. By focusing my research on the co-branding of children's films, I will be able to examine the practice in its most ubiquitous mode. Limiting my research to co-branded television commercials will allow me to focus exclusively on moving images. Commercials preserved at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and stored online in the AdLand database, will facilitate this research.
Background and Justification
Since the advent of feature film narrative, advertising and movies have engaged in a mutually shameless relationship. Sumiko Higashi has argued that Cecil B. DeMille's melodramas of the 1920s contained product placement so relentless as to reflect "increasingly ostentatious and even outré levels of consumption." One scene in DeMille's Why Change Your Wife? (1920), juxtaposes a conspicuously fashionable young woman (Gloria Swanson), with a close-up of her name brand perfume. The perfume swivels slightly on its own, as if on a rotating pedestal, literally acting out what Marx termed, "the mystical character of commodities." The scene seems corny now, but in the early years of film, the cinema had a powerful ability to set national trends of consumption, and advertisers wanted a share of that spectacle.
By the 1960s, foreign competition and the looming threat of TV programming had made the Hollywood studios profoundly insecure. American avant-garde films enjoyed their most significant flourish, as independent filmmakers conversed with the countercultural movements that so characterized the decade. Large corporations purchased many of the ailing studios, and the resulting partnerships led to the convergence of music, television, film, and consumer products. The Hollywood studios increasingly came to be seen by their parent companies as makers of one product in a field of many, and films were marketed accordingly. Thomas Frank has shown that advertising too changed drastically during the sixties, as corporations responded to the demands of increasingly media savvy consumers. Unconventional campaigns full of self-parody replaced the stodgy scientific ads of the 1950s, as advertisers actively engaged with the mass society critique of the countercultural movement. Avis Rent-A-Car touted itself, "Number Two" in the business, while Volkswagen, in sharp contrast to the marketing campaigns of bigger-is-better domestic carmakers, emphasized the car's diminutive size and ugliness. These ads undermined criticisms levied at the invasive consumerism of mass media by parodying the advertising medium itself: what Frank calls the "strategy of preemptive irony. The ads were hugely successful in establishing brand loyalty and consumer confidence, and with movies now just one product in a diversified field of consumer entertainment, similar approaches to movie marketing could be expected. Where advertising had once encroached upon the spectacle of early cinema, the Hollywood studios would now insinuate their myths ad infinitum into the thriving ruse of the modern ad campaign.
Co-branded advertising officially emerged in the late 1970s as the marketing strategy of choice for Hollywood filmmakers: most notably in ads for the movie Star Wars, which featured now notorious TV spots such as that depicting androids C3PO and R2D2 visiting a Burger Chef fast food restaurant. By the end of the 1980s, co-branded advertising was all-pervading. Janet Wasko's laundry list approach to marketing analysis for Willow (1988), another George Lucas film, attests to this fact: the film appeared in commercials for Quaker Oats Co., General Foods, Hunt-Wesson, Kraft, Wendy's Intl., Tonka Toys, Parker Brothers and Random House. While Willow did not achieve the box office success many had planned for it, these advertising partnerships brought in over $50 million in tie-in revenues: a financial success that significantly cushioned the fall of an otherwise underwhelming film. Nearly all of these co-branded advertising campaigns were tied exclusively to children's films. Marsha Kinder has argued that modern children's entertainment "teaches viewers that commercial interactivity empowers precocious consumers by enabling them to assimilate the world as they buy into the system."
In this sense, a kinship exists between the new consuming strategies of the 1960s and the current state of children's programming. Modern advertising language, with its rhetoric of empowerment and individuality, provides an ideal model for reaching the child consumer: repressed, as were the consumers of the straight-laced 1950s, by a stultifying lack of agency. Through examining the way modern advertising techniques are employed in co-branded advertisements for children's films, this link between idioms of empowerment can be further explored.
Contemporary American cinema does not, as it did in the 1920s, simply allow advertising admission into the filmmaking process; it actively pursues the advertisement, and is perhaps best characterized as a subsidiary of the advertising industry, not the other way around. Despite the increasing importance of advertising to the modern film industry, film scholars have largely neglected the actual content these partnerships create, instead focusing their scholarship on the economic details of business mergers. While this aspect of the film industry is no doubt essential, co-branded advertising is itself profoundly interesting. A recapitulation of the film/advertising relationship is long overdue, and by fully examining the most ubiquitous mode of co-branded advertising—in the form of TV commercials for children's films/products—the changing role of cinema in the contemporary media landscape can be pinpointed and articulated. This new conception of cinema will serve to reorient our commonly held notions of film spectatorship, while providing a crucial insight into the role of film in our modern commodity culture.
Project Plan
The focus of my summer research will be on viewing co-branded advertisements for children's films. Within the category of children's films, my first priority will be earlier ads, such as those for Star Wars and E.T.; my goal will be to comprehensively examine the practice at the time its conventions were first formalized.
For access to television commercials, I will rely heavily on the UCLA Film & Television Archive's Key Art Awards collection, which contains over 4,000 TV spots for commercial films from 1982-2005. The collection, as well as the Archive's online database, is fully searchable and I have already located a wide variety of co-branded advertising spots: most notably for films made in the past three years, which comprise the bulk of UCLA's Key Art collection. For earlier advertisements, I will rely on surprisingly comprehensive fan and hobbyist websites. The most thorough of these online archives is AdLand (www.ad-rag.com); the website is also fully searchable by keyword, and indexed by year. Advertisements aired between 1977 and 1989, of which AdLand has over 1,100 titles, will be of particular interest to me. Through this resource, I have already been able to acquire and watch a commercial for E.T. and Atari.
