The medium is still the message

Annoyed by the insidious creep of marketing, Morgan Spurlock has made a film about product placement. The twist? It's funded by product placement. Shane Gilchrist reports.

Among the many if-you-don't-laugh-you'll-cry moments in Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, is one that encapsulates the American film-maker's motivation for embarking on a project that provided him with equal parts insight and personal abuse.

Consumer advocate, environmentalist and former United States presidential candidate Ralph Nader, asked by Spurlock to suggest when a person could expect to escape advertising's incessant bombardment, provides a concise answer: "In your sleep".

In POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Spurlock explores the world of product placement, marketing and advertising. But there's a twist. The film has been fully financed through product placement of various brands, all of which are integrated transparently into the film.

Although using brands to promote and/or help fund feature films is nothing new for Hollywood - notable recent examples include Transformers and Iron Man - it is new territory for a documentary.

In fact, Spurlock went so far as to sell naming rights, hence the inclusion of American pomegranate drink manufacturer POM Wonderful in his movie's title for a cool $US1 million.

"After you have watched this movie, I don't think you'll watch television and film in the same way again," says Spurlock via telephone during a promotional visit to Auckland last week. In a case of life imitating art, he confirms he's wearing the same Merrell shoes that he promotes in his documentary.

"I think at some point everyone is going to want to stop giving me things for free. Unfortunately, I didn't put 'lifetime supply' in the contract. I wasn't a very smart negotiator."

Spurlock might be chuckling, yet he is serious about his subject matter.

"Everywhere you go someone is trying to sell you something, whether it is while pumping gas, riding in an elevator, sitting in the back of a cab or even going to the bathroom - there are ads in front of you.

"I think we live in a world where we have become so desensitised to the saturation of marketing. We are really good at it in America. It seems we find a way to wedge advertising and marketing into just about everything.

"But it is making its way around the world. It has just become legal in the United Kingdom to have product placement on television and is becoming a big business there. It is starting to make its way into different European countries. It is going to get worse," Morgan says.

"I saw the ever-pervasive world of advertising was making its way into entertainment and thought it would be good to pull back the curtain and get brands to actually pay for a film about the process.

"The idea was to get in and see the machinations. I wanted to capture as many of the negotiations as possible, to go into rooms people never get to go into."

Spurlock arrived at the idea for a multilayered satire about two years ago while he and fellow producer and co-writer Jeremy Chilnick were discussing American television show Heroes and its inclusion of a Nissan SUV into the series' storyline.

The discussion turned to how product placements were more than just advertisements for products; they were also tools that enhanced the marketing "footprints" of shows and films.

Could a little movie, even a documentary, have the same type of partnerships and co-promotion opportunities?

He wanted to make a film that had more cross-promotion than any documentary before had.

By the time The Greatest Movie Ever Sold screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the movie's producers had signed up 15 companies; another seven were added before it went to general release in the United States in April.

"So now we have 22 brand partners and a lot of them are global brands, so they are continuing to push the film on a global basis. They not only came to the table offering the film cash but also marketing dollars," Spurlock boasts.

Sponsors were provided with brand category exclusivity. In return, those brands placed Spurlock at the centre of their brand campaigns and advertisements and have the right to promote themselves in association with Spurlock and the film as "The Greatest".