Introduction
The view of products in media has taken many forms with the likes of advertising being a form of direct influence for consumers to sell products. One of these forms is at the heart of this assignment, that is product placement. The technological advancement of the 21st century has seen changes in the way product placement works in media with the internet slowly becoming a common place for product placement along with being a part of it traditional roots in film and television.
Product placement has its roots imbedded in media with its first sighting being in literature in works by writers such as Charles Dickens having mentions to known brands of the time (Newell, Salmon and Chang 2006, p. 579), the first recorded sightings of product integration in visual media is said to have been in a film by early film pioneers the Lumière brothers. The brother’s camera operator had a product by British soap manufacturer company Lever Brothers feature one of the short films made by the Lumière company (Newell, Salmon and Chang 2006, p. 580), this is seen by most as the earliest appearance of Product Placement in a piece of visual media.
Ever since product placement has been a regular feature in film and television with the early silent films of Hollywood being the beginning of the intentional use of it in film with films such as Buster Keaton’s outing in the The Garage (Arbuckle 1919) and the movie Wings (Wellman 1927) being an early examples of different types of product