Films are a non-PC environment, says DONALD CLARKE
I am, at this moment, interacting with an object that appears improbably frequently in Hollywood movies. Alas, I am not discharging a Glock pistol or landing a Black Hawk helicopter. Screenwriter is, rather, battering away at the keys of a shiny Apple Macintosh.
The last time I bothered to check, Apple controlled less than 10 per cent of the US PC market, but the citizens of movieland continue to use little else. Consider, if you can bear it, last week’s horrendous Bride Wars.
Kate Hudson, a high-powered lawyer, examines her briefs on a super-charged Mac Book Pro. Anne Hathaway, an underpaid, overworked teacher, types lesson plans on the relatively affordable white Mac Book. Candice Bergen, a famous wedding planner, does whatever those parasites do on the suave, featherweight Mac Book Air. For every one-note movie character there is, it seems, an appropriate Macintosh.
Now, you may well point out that Bride Wars (what a sack of immoral filth) features the sort of characters – Manhattan snoots – who would, indeed, incline towards Apple’s premium-end products. But Macs appear everywhere in Hollywood films.
A recent survey by market- researcher Interbrand discovered that, since 2001, 30 per cent of films that reached the number- one spot at the US box-office featured an Apple product. When the company published its report in autumn of 2008, a whopping 50 per cent of that year’s number- one films had showcased the company’s wares. Yet even that figure underplays the ubiquity of Steve Jobs’s babies. (Just look across the page – it happens in print too.) If you disregard period and fantasy films, then Apple turned up in 67 per cent of the remaining chart-toppers.
The Apple secretariat, whose hippie posturing is often been backed up by steel-spined commercial ruthlessness, claims it does not pay for product placement and will not discuss how its computers make their way into films.
A 2005 report from PQ Media research offers some support for Apple’s assertion. It found that 64 per cent of movie product placement was not paid for, but “arranged through some kind of barter in which the show provides exposure in exchange for products or services”.
It should also be remembered that production designers want their characters to look cool and, more than 30 years after the company’s creation, Apple computers remain stubbornly fashionable. Nobody wants to see Kurt Baxter PI using a Ukrainian Blok 486 PC.
So, does all this exposure have any significant effect on sales? It seems not. Throughout the 1990s, the darkest time for Apple, a Mac sat smugly on Jerry Seinfeld’s desk. Yet, despite endorsement from the era’s most popular situation comedy, sales continued to slump and it required genuine innovation – the iMac, iPod and iPhone – to revitalise the company’s fortunes.
The Apple copywriters had it right all along. You can shove any amount of product in punters’ faces, but many will still proudly “think different” (sic).
