Why a kicking from Morgan Spurlock is good for our industry
In this guest post, former Campaign Palace Sydney planner Arwa Mahdawi, says that the kicking Morgan Spurlock’s new film gives our industry just might be good for it.
If there’s one thing you can say about documentary-maker Morgan Spurlock it’s that he’s good at stating the obvious.
In Super Size Me we learned that junk food is bad for you. Then, in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? We learned that, um, nobody knows where he is. Now, in Spurlock’s latest project, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, we’re shown how branded messages are everywhere and product placement is on the increase.
But while Morgan Spurlock is often obvious, he’s always interesting and he’s undeniably good at engineering debate. And that is exactly the point of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold: to increase awareness about branded messages within content and to start a public debate about both its merits and its evils. For all of us who work in advertising, this should be a very interesting debate to watch unfold, not to mention contribute to.
If you’re not familiar with The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, here’s a brief trailer: to start with that’s not its title. Its full title is Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. In a Spurlockian twist, his documentary about product placement and advertising was entirely paid for by product placement and advertising.
The Greatest Movie is a meta-film: it documents Spurlock’s attempts to get brands to fund a project whose purported aim is to cast their marketing practices in a less than salubrious light. Most of the 500+ companies he contacted (including McDonalds) told him to get lost. But 15 brands, including JetBlue, Hyatt and Ted Baker happily piled in, together contributing a total of $1.5 million to sponsor and place products in the film. And Pom Wonderful, a company which seems to have extracted more profit from the pomegranate than you might ever think possible, paid $1 million for the naming rights.
After The Greatest Movie was shown at the Sundance Film Festival a flurry of newspaper articles came out with headlines like: Spurlock Launches Assault Against Onscreen Product Placement. But Spurlock’s documentary (or ‘docbuster’ as he brands it) is far from being an assault on either product placement or the advertising industry. Indeed, in colluding with practices he critiques, Spurlock has been accused of selling out. In response to these accusations, Spurlock cryptically says that as long as you’re doing “better than they do, you’re not selling out, you’re buying in….I’m just buying into the idea of studio filmmaking.”
Fast Company consider Spurlock’s caginess an invitation for “viewers to debate whether consumers can trust his movie — or any of the content they receive.” So, in a recent comment piece in British newspaper The Guardian, I invited readers to debate the issue. As The Guardian is a left-leaning paper with quite a vocal anti-advertising readership I thought I’d get a barrage of scathing responses about product placement – especially considering that, until recently, the practice has been very tightly regulated in the UK.
However, I was (pleasantly) surprised. Amongst the inevitable bonkers comments, the general sentiment seemed to be that, if done right, product placement can be a good thing. In in a time of widespread cuts, the money for arts has to come from somewhere. So why not brands?
Once Spurlock’s film comes out on general release there will almost certainly be more of a debate about the matter. Marketing and advertising will be put under an even harsher light than usual. Especially as Pom Wonderful is currently under scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission for making false and unsubstantiated claims that their products will prevent or treat various diseases including, inter alia, erectile dysfunction.
After Super Size Me was released, the Golden Arches’ PR machine was swift to respond to the tide of anti-McDonalds sentiment the film unleashed. The company’s response varied wildly, however, between markets. In the UK it behaved with good old-fashioned British dignity. A full-page ad was issued, telling people that McDonalds liked Spurlock’s film and agreed with the idea that eating their food everyday was unhealthy. And then they highlighted the healthier items on McDonalds’s menus and emphasized the exaggerated nature of Spurlock’s experiment. In the US it was very different. They called it a “gross-out movie” and responded with an aggressive PR campaign.
Our industry has a choice at the moment as to how we react to The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. I’m English, so I’m biased, but I reckon following the route of the UK McDonalds PR team is the way to go. Showing a little humility and owning up to our occasional faults might just be refreshing for Adland.
Arwa Mahdawi, who represented Australia in the AdFest Young Lotus competition last month, is based in New York and works for Ogilvy Entertainment.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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And then there is always Bill Hicks’ take;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
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Good piece. An unusually well written, interesting agenda free piece of Opinion on Mumbrella
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i disagree – i don’t think this piece has shared anything except a protracted exposition of Spurlock’s film, and a rag-tag collection of “what person X though, although person Y thought something else”.
Opinion pieces should offer an opinion. It seems the best this item could muster is a glib “lets respond with good old fashioned british dignity”.
Yawn.
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I guess thus is why she us former campaign palace, oh please
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I agree there is a lot to be explored around the issue of product placement and whether this needs to be made clear to consumers of the content.
I also think the advertising industry needs to be thinking more about the influence that large advertisers sometimes exert, or at least try to exert, on the integrity of news editorial in print and on screen. I’m sure most industry people are aware of multiple instances of this, but it’s a topic that gets very little oxygen.
For instance, I imagine the executives of a large supermarket chain would’ve had some interesting reactions to all the recent articles about the pressure it’s pricing policy is putting on local farm producers.
What is the ethical response to this? Is it appropriate to use advertising heft in an attempt to influence the news?
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“In Super Size Me we learned that junk food is bad for you”
– Well done for simplifying thing into meaningless. Super Size Me changed the Maccas menu, it catalysed positive social change.
Where you aware that brands engaging in product placement have little to no editorial rights in the filmmaking process? They are not producers. Ever seen that clip from Wayne’s World?
Also, you’d do well to point out this is the first documentary with PP, doco filmmakers work hard to avoid litigation by inadvertently including brand related stuff in their films. Drama on the other hand with bigger budgets)and movie stars, loves a bit of PP. It is part of every studio release. Some do it tastefully, it’s the every other film that’s in Spurlock’s sight.
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