The future is now.For those of you who watched the Academy Awards, you witnessed the future of advertising and you probably didn't even know it. Jon Stewart, after another generic commercial break, was seen on stage only a wii-mote (the controller for Nintendo's video game system), a little girl with a wii-mote and two screens showing Wii-Tennis, Nintendo's stop selling game for its Wii console (included in WiiSports). The pair played for roughly 15 seconds, showing how an uncooridnated middle-aged talk show host can have just as much fun as little kid. Soon the little girl ran off stage and left Stewart alone. All he muttered was, "Man I am winded" and then he simply proceeded to introduce the next presenters and nominees.
I am not saying that product placement is new, but it seems that now adays cross-placement is becoming ubiqutous with the entertainment industry. The Academy Awards used to exist simply to praise those in the film industry, yet on stage they gave precious time to a video game system. This acceptance of video games on the Kodak Theatre's stage is a landmark moment for the video game industry. Film's not-so-distant cousin seems to have been granted membership into entertainment's sybiotic circle of film, tv and music.
Another new way of cross promotion came about with the new release of the film Jumper. While I was watching tv a trailer came on for Jumper. Thinking this was just another paint by numbers film trailer, I watched with little interest. However, in the middle of the trailer, the commercial jumped to a Dell Personal Computer Ad with tennis star Serena Williams. In Jumper, the main character can transport himself anywhere. In this case, he decides that he is bored with his own trailer and transports himself into this Dell PC commercial. It was fascinating. Now, this might not showcase new technologies (CGI and cross-cutting have been around for decades), but it does showcase how we can use existing technologies in new ways to attact the audiences attention -- the most important thing in any business.
In the future, cross promotion between film and technoloy companies will not stop with the Academy and the Wii and Jumper with Dell. My ambiguous rhetorical question is:
When this cross promotion becomes cheesy and the audience once again is bored, what is the next step?
1 comment:
I saw that too... I'm thinking back and trying to remember if they even mentioned the name Nintendo or Wii. Did they? I think they just alluded that it's a Wii.
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