Top 10 in-your-face technology product placement slots
That was a great show, now, I must rush out and buy lots of shiny new tech gadgets
You can always tell when a company is giving it the hard sell and it is often a bit of a turn off, with flashy ad campaigns falling over themselves to tell you how great something is, but often just making you scoff and pour scorn on their efforts.
Must it always be this way? Well, no actually, as many companies use oh-so-subtle product placements in TV shows and movies to try and hawk their wares, without us realising, so we finish our show or film with the sudden urge to buy a new laptop of phone.
We've rounded up a few of the best (well, worst) examples in the top 10, and V3 is sure there's plenty more you've seen that made you cringe, so let us know in the box below.
10. Microsoft's Bing searches for new users
Microsoft knows it has a fight on its hands to make its Bing service a true rival to Google so, alongside extensive advertising campaigns, it's also gone undercover to get its Bing search tool used in numerous shows.
One is Source Code, where our eight-minute alternative universe time-travelling hero borrows a women's phone to try and find information on his predicament and immediately flicks it open to find the Bing browser is her home page. This is just one of the many unbelievable plot twists in the film.
Another good example is Reel Steel, a ridiculous robot-building-and-fighting movie in which Bing appears numerous times.
Our favourite, though, is Hawaii Five-0 in which a character, incredulous about something another character is claiming, is instructed to "Bing it!" in the same way everyone else in the real world would say, "Google it". Check it out below.
Top 10 in-your-face technology product placement slots
That was a great show, now, I must rush out and buy lots of shiny new tech gadgets
9. House of Cards is an Apple-filled world
Putting aside its intriguing plot, House of Card s is also interesting as it show was the first ever made-for-Netflix TV show.
Telling the tale of a corrupt senator as he mercilessly uses his skills of persuasion to climb the political ladder, House of Cards sees its cast spend a fair amount of time on their phones.
We're guessing this fact wasn't lost on Apple, with the entire cast of characters, ranging from rich billionaires to lowly street thugs all owning iPhone handsets.
In fact, were it not for the odd appearance of a Windows PC in the distance, you'd be entirely justified thinking Apple was the only phone and laptop maker in the whole world of House of Cards.8. Sony Vaios get Damaged
US TV show Damages was a legal thriller that ran for five seasons from 2007 to 2012, centring on a high-profile lawyer and her protégé.
The show was made by Sony Pictures, which clearly decided that by season five it was time to get some more return for its investment by going down the ever-popular product placement route. But Sony Pictures decided to go one better than all the other examples on this list, and use its own TV show to promote its own computers.
And so it came to pass that every character appearing in Damages just happened to have chosen a Sony Vaio laptop - from Patty Hewes, nominated as a judge in the US Supreme Court, to Ellen Parsons, setting up her own ethical practice, to Channing McClaren, loosely based on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and running his version of a leaks site.
The first two examples could just about fit within the realms of plausibility - although one scene in an airport with both lawyers sitting on opposite sides of the room, both displaying their Vaio logos was slightly distracting. But the idea that the head of a leaks site would also use a Vaio laptop pushed the whole premise into the realms of the ridiculous.
7. James Bond has a license to carry a middling-phone It's no secret James Bond is a gadget aficionado. Thanks to his faithful lab geek Q for over half a century Bond has been equipped with cutting edge, life saving gadgets.
These have included cars that turn into submarines, watch lasers capable of cutting through metal and now, thanks to some hefty advertising spending from Sony, the Xperia T smartphone.
Throughout the entire plot of the Skyfall the buff British special agent carried the Xperia T alongside his trademark PPK pistol, which was surprising considering the fact the T wasn't all that cutting edge at the time, featuring a dual, not quad-core, processor and running an outdated version of Android.
Still, being Bond, he totally pulled it off.
Top 10 in-your-face technology product placement slots
That was a great show, now, I must rush out and buy lots of shiny new tech gadgets
6. Kim Kardashian shows some BlackBerry love
BlackBerry needn’t have bothered splashing out all that cash on recruiting Alicia Keyes as creative director, as it’s already got a long-term and much more influential celebrity fan in Kim Kardashian.
The female role model/buxom beauty/scourge of society depending on your viewpoint, has had various BlackBerry models glued to her hands throughout several seasons of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and all the family’s spinoff programmes.
Kim has managed to get her siblings and mother on-board as BlackBerry users as well, no doubt so they can BBM each other about vital issues like whether white-on-white is a valid summer look.
The irony here is that it doesn’t appear BlackBerry has paid one cent to get Kim and co to use its products, and so has managed to get seen as the smartphone of choice for mega-rich, glamourous celebs for free. Marketing departments, take note.
5. Cisco Telepresence pops up on 24 and 30 Rock
Keen to show off its enterprise chops Cisco must have paid a pretty penny to have its video conversation tool TelePresence used several times in hour-by-hour drama 24.
The show oh-so-subtle displays the in-room use of the system, the multi-screen capabilities and the ability to share information on separate monitors, to chat about an impending nuclear terrorist attack on New York.
Cisco’s phone and WebEx systems also get a look-in throughout the show. You can watch these clips proudly displayed on the ‘Cisco on TV & in the movies’ webpage.
In a more obvious nod to product placement, though, 30 Rock took advantage of Cisco’s largess to make subtle digs at itself for using the technology when maverick chief executive Jack Donahue was forced to use the tool after he caught bed bugs.
Telepresence on 30 Rock from ITP Telepresence on Vimeo.
Top 10 in-your-face technology product placement slots
That was a great show, now, I must rush out and buy lots of shiny new tech gadgets
4. Larry Ellison: Superhero?
When Oracle's marketing team sat down to decide where to spend their 2012 budget, they clearly decided to think outside the normal box of airport billboards and business magazines.
Instead they turned to Marvel comic's Iron Man 2 to help promote Oracle's enterprise IT products, with the tag line: "Just as man and machine join flawlessly to power Marvel's invincible hero Iron Man, Oracle's industry-leading software and hardware seamlessly integrate to deliver a complete IT stack unmatched by any competitor." Catchy.
Not only did some of the firm's Exadata boxes appear in the film, but chief executive Larry Ellison even got to make a brief four-word cameo with this immortal dialogue.
Tony Stark: "Hey the oracle of Oracle, what a pleasure, nice to see you."
Larry Ellison: "Call me, call me."
This collaboration had an extra bonus for visitors to the Oracle OpenWorld show in September 2010. Larry had clearly had that call from Tony, and had managed to loan some of his suits to display at the OpenWorld expo - a definite improvement on the normal lineup of grey boxes delegates are treated to.\
3. Homeland cast use Skype for chats about terrorism
The use of Skype in Homeland proved to be a unique moment in TV marketing. Instead of getting more people to use a product after it appeared in a hit show, the marketing geniuses at work managed to drive viewers of the programme away in their hoards.
The problem was, the product placement here broke the golden rule: it wasn't just unlikely but so far removed from reality that it undermined the internal logic of a show that was already stretching the viewers' credulity.
In Homeland, the CIAs agents were shown to constantly fret about whether their communication lines might be bugged. Then the top brass decided to use Skype from their US headquarters to contact field agents in hostile territory.
But what really ticked the viewers off were scenes of anti-hero Brody using Skype to make video calls from his smartphone. It wasn't just that the call quality was perfect, but rather the call was being made from a BlackBerry handset - none of which in that range had front-facing cameras at the time.
Top 10 in-your-face technology product placement slots
That was a great show, now, I must rush out and buy lots of shiny new tech gadgets
2. The Matrix hooks up with Nokia
The Matrix painted a chilling vision of the future where humans are nothing more than batteries for evil machines and, worse, the only phone safe to use was a Nokia 8110.
Of course in 1999 Nokia was top dog in the mobile phone world and so there was no other choice for hero Neo to be seen with when being chased by the evil Agents and calling for help. The spring loaded flip out only made it all the more exciting.
Now, though, Nokia is facing a fight to claw back market share. Still, at least we haven’t all become mindless drones hooked into little devices stuck in our pockets that we stare at endless, enslaved to the constant drip feed of information from machines. Oh, wait…
1. Surface crops up on 90210
By all accounts Microsoft’s Surface tablet has not sold especially well since it went live. This is despite some hilarious product placement in the modern remake of Beverly Hills 90210.
Watch the below video for a some fantastic acting-come-marketing of the device: “Oh wow, you got me a Surface…”, “Yep, it even has Skype”, the actors dully intone, before the camera lingers on the device for a few more seconds more than is strictly natural.
In fact, judging by the below montage, it seems to form the entire plot point for an episode, and some sort of sad break-up or music career, or something. Whatever the story line, we're not sure this was the Microsoft marketing departments finest hour.