Apple not paying it's product-placement bills for nip/tuck?!?!

[TheMac19]

Just caught the season finale of nip/tuck here and couldn't help but notice that the apple logo was "missing" from the tiBook the good doctors used to look up info on Ava Moore. Looks like somebody airbrushed it out in post-production... The screenshots of them using the computer are clearly OSX, yet the lid of the powerbook has no glowing Apple. I watched it on television so I can't provide a screenshot, but I bet somebody around here could...

Makes me wonder is there's a product placement battle going on. I remember when this happened to the Klein bike hanging in the background of Seinfeld; it magically turned into a Cannondale when Klein supposedly refused to provide a slew of free bikes to the show.

Since I know I'm quite a few months behind on the show, so I tried googling this anti-apple editing, and was quite surprised that I didn't find any mentions of this in the mac communities online. Perhaps I'm a bit hypersensitive to product-placement on the television...

 

[dejo]

AFAIK, Apple doesn't, and won't, pay for product placement.

 

[36183]

maybe apple have realized that all the product placement they do in movies is nowhere near as effective as some newspaper ads so they are giving up on the crap.

by the way nip/tuck is great.

 

[Mord]

yeah, they did that on some french and sanders thing too turned the apple into a glowing circle on a tibook, the difference probably is is if the laptop is owned by the company or an individual, if the latter no way in hell the apple is being sprayed over.

 

[iGary]

AFAIK, Apple doesn't, and won't, pay for product placement.

Watch a season of Queer as Folk and tell me Apple didn't dime up for all the Macs on that show.

 

[Mord]

if your directed a show wouldn't you make all the computers on set macs?, creative types are more likely to be mac users and even if they were not mac fans macs look nicer and make better sets.

blade trinity was the most mac filled film and i dont think apple payed them purely because the macs were not brand spanking new, the displays were the old style ones and the girl used a tibook, the ipod bit was a bit tacky but i dont think apple payed them for it.

 

[zach]

Same thing with Alias: the apple logos are always blanked out.

The dell logos, on the other hand, are not...

 

[chelseasian]

I am in the media business and deal with product placement, integration etc. Typically these deals are worked out way before production starts, so that the marketers can work with the producers and writers the specifics that has got to do with the brand based on the amount of dollars paid. i.e. having say an iMac sitting in the background of a scene, versus having a character in the show working with the iMac in a scene, and top of the tier, having the character working with an iMac and perhaps showing a friend, as part of the plot, how easy it is to do something with it.

A lot of times it is obvious that the computer or laptop that a character is using is a Powerbook or iMac etc. but one of the reasons why the logo is blurred out or stuck with a sticker over is because Apple did not pay for the endorsement and there are some legalities involved. I.e. supposed the scene shows a charcter building a bomb or something out of an iBook or something negative, Apple would definitely do not want to be associated with that.

At the end of the day why Apple logos are blurred out? It's because they did not pay the networks to feature it.

 

[TheMac19]

Unfortunately I don't have any hard facts about this at hand, but I would guarantee that Apple pays for product placement. That's just the way things go - everything in every shot is there for a reason, and economics play a big part of this. In a film, if someone is using an iPod, you can almost always safely bet it's because Apple outbid Sony and all the others for the spot. That's the way things go in the entertainment world... Same with the cars people drive in shows and films, etc. Great example is the Sopranos - the lack of regular commercials is more than made up for by huge amounts of embedded advertising.

Anyway, what I was surprised with is taking the glowing Apple OUT of a shot. That generally means that some sort of shady negotiating is going on after the fact, and that apparently Apple didn't win. Interesting...