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Do companies pay to get hot gadgets into music videos?
By: Carolina, Belgium
A.B. Replies: Let's put it this way: Jessica Simpson's video may have been a "public affair" for her famous buddies, like Eva Longoria, but the Hewlett Packard people, whose gadgets were featured at least four times in the video? It was a little harder for them to get past the door and onto the set. Like, $200,000 harder.
That's the price the company reportedly paid in order to have Andy Dick whip out an HP Ipaq gadget and mug with it for the cameras. (For another $200,000, he would have licked it, peeled off its shiny casing and made passionate love to it, but HP did not want to be held responsible for a hybrid race of vaguely gay Dick/iPaq cyborgs.)
It's well known in the product placement world that getting your gadget into a video is tougher than sneaking it into a TV show or a movie. After all, studios have executives who do nothing but orchestrate product placements. To crack a video set, a company pretty much has to know the talent or someone in the talent's camp, or even the video director or stylist. There are no dedicated go-betweens.
Nonetheless, companies are increasingly offering cash in exchange for that quality time with Andy Dick.
"You want to reach those influencers--those early adopters," says Michael Schrager, whose Entertainment Marketing Company orchestrates product placements. His clients usually do not pay for their deals, but, given HP's Satanic six-figure pact with Simpson, plenty of companies don't seem to mind.
The only risk: Sometimes your more blatant placements can be a little too over the top--even to the rather childlike intellect of MTV viewers--and the networks demand a change. That's what happened a few years ago, when Nelly filmed his video for "Air Force Ones," a dedication to his house-brand sneaker. MTV was so disgusted by the in-your-face placement of the sneakers, it demanded a serious edit of the video before it could air.
That said, electronic gadgets still seem to be the top product placement toys in videos these days. Other recent sellouts in the music world include Nelly Furtado, Rihanna, T.I., Bon Jovi and Cassie, all of whose videos have lent plenty of camera time to beeping, singing devices that will cost us average people at least a few hundred bucks.
The celebrities, naturally, get them for free.
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