Product Placement: Reese’s Pieces in the E.T.

Product Placement: Reese’s Pieces in the E.T.

        Product placement is a marketing and advertising strategy that is highly used by companies today. Product placement is embedding a product into action by constantly making appearances on TV series, movies or other media. The main reason for outstanding popularity of product placement technique is it actually facilitates what advertisers try to accomplish, which is connecting a product to certain emotions in  order to position that product in consumers’ in a way they wanted. The other part of the story is, in reality product placement’s being actually beneficial for the viewers since they are not distracted by some unwanted, constantly repeating, pop-up advertisements, they keep watching or seeing what they wanted to see in the first place, in this case the movie or a TV series.  A good and old example for product placement could be “Reese’s Pieces” appearance in the movie E.T. The story begins by Steven Spielberg’s, the producer of the big hit, wish to use M&M’s bar in the movie due to its high popularity those days. But the Mars brand, the owner of the M&M’S, turned them down but the Hershey Company wanted to move on with the movie. As a result, E.T became a big hit and it was off the charts in 1982, which in turn brought an unexpected demand itself, increasing the total revenue of Reese’s Pieces candy bar by %65.

        In the movie, the boy named Elliot and the alien, E.T, meet in the beginning of the story. The boy wanted to leave trails for alien to follow the boy to his home. So he drops candies aong the road on his way home. The trails are the candy bars and the boy can be seen with the Reese’s Candy package on his bike when leaving the trails of candies. The product appears right in an important action, capturing everyone’s attention undoubtly.

[pic 1]

The boy leaving candy bar trails for the alien

After the first appearance of the product along the story, Reese’s Pieces also shows up in some other scenes until the end of the movie.        [pic 2]