You Look Like You Need a Guinness

prestidigital writes "This is a great fictional advertisement (high bandwidth) for Guinness. I say "fictional" because it is from the movie Minority Report. You may recall that Steven Spielberg is known for heavy branding in movies ala the opening scenes from Back to the Future (Burger King and Pepsi plastered all over). Well, apparently he has taken it a step further by weaving it into the very fabric of the plot in Minority Report. Cool ads if you can afford to wait for them. Lexus is good."

Re:Personal Ads?

[Eythian]

Anyone agree?

As with many things, its a trade off. On one hand, with the sort of thing in the movie, they know what you get last time and could help you find something similar. Many people would find this sort of thing convenient (provided it wasn't too annoying like, say, a paperclip could be). However, speaking for myself, the privacy aspect would be worrying. It removes the voluntary part of submitting information. Kind of like the online newpaper registration systems, only so ubiquitous that it would be impossible to avoid.

stuff to come

[Ankou]

You can already see that this kind of advertising is soon to come. Ya get hundreds of email spam with your name on it and you get tons of phone calls a day congradulating YOU for being accepted for a new low rate card. How many of you agree that if not the eyes being scanned, there is at least this huge war for the eye balls at every website you go to. Remember those obnoxious flash adds, flashing adds, adds that run all over the page you are trying to read, and not to mention the ones with audio. I think there is a line that consumers are going to put up with. We have been pounded and proded by product placement in every single medium we use, and there is a point where you start to loose customers who get pissed off with this invasion of sanity. Hopefully people will speak up before the ads in this movie become a reality otherwise I am going to start wearing mirror sunglasses.

hells bells

[savbill]

what the fuck - lexus sucks dogs farts. beemers are the only way to spend serious money. fuck commercials, fuck adverts, fuck capitalism, eat the rich, fuck their children, die, die, die!

Philip K. Dick to the Meta

[localroger]

The ads targeted by retinal scans appeared in several PKD stories (though not, notably, The Minority Report itself). This movie is the best PKD adaptation ever; the things which were added to flesh it out to movie length are almost all taken from other PKD works.

If PKD were still alive he would be laughing his ass off at the product placements in this movie; not only are the ads portrayed as he envisioned, the moviemakers actually used the techniques being portrayed to help pay for the movie portraying them.

On second viewing I also have to say that the "not too futuristic future" is more different from ours than it first appears. Every flat surface in the movie's public space is a monitor showing ads. Even the cereal box! (That was soooo Philip K. Dick.) While The Gap might not be around in 2050, you can rest assured some other business serving the same niche will be; and it and the fashions within will be as unremarkable to the people of 2050 as the Gap and its product are to us in 2002.

And you have to really wonder whether the rest of the movie after Anderton is haloed is just a fantasy (a la Total Recall) or if it really happened...

When Ads Attack

[mgrochmal]

When I saw Minority Report recently, I remember John Anderton being bombarded by ads. Another series came to mind when I was reading it: Futurama. Specifically, the episode where it starts with the gang going online with VR goggles and, just as they see the pretty digital effects, they're swarmed by lifesize pop-up ads. They have to literally fight their way through, punching and kicking the OK buttons.

They weren't high-resolution holograms with customized messages, but it still had the feeling of being smothered by commercials that I felt in Minority Report. I enjoyed the actual plot of the movie, but the deja vu of overactive commercials gave me a laugh.

Logo placement and PKD movies

[theRhinoceros]

There is a reputed Blade Runner Curse [scribble.com], referring to a number of brands given prominent display in Blade Runner which fell victim to hard financial times during the 80's, with the exception of Coca-Cola. Brands such as Atari and Pan Am, which were featured quite prominently in ads on the sides of buildings lost a tremendous amount business, to the point of collapse (although I was shocked last week to see the Atari brand on my NWN box). It wouldn't surprise me, then, to see a number of companies shown in Minority Report to collapse before 2054, even currently viable corporate behemoths. I would like to think that their inclusion in a speculative illustration of dystopian coporate intrusion would be the "real reason" they collapsed, and that PKD somehow had a part in it, laughing at the irony of it all.

Not really new

[qweqwe]

If you look at:

the DEMOLITION MAN (1993) quote:
--------
Lenina Huxley: [T]aco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars.
John Spartan: So?
Lenina Huxley: So, now all restaurants are Taco Bell.
--------

and "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial" (1982) key scene where the film's main human character, 9-year-old Elliott, lured E.T. of the woods with Reese's Pieces

you'll see it's been around for a while.