Abram Sauer Online

A while ago I took a look at the Righteous Kill watch product placement screw up and noted how watches, in general, make for bad product placements.

It appears Breitling not only seems to not care about this but also, with help from John Travolta, has taken bad watch product placement to a whole new level. And, despite my earlier claims about why watch placements are bad — “The brands don’t show up and even when they do they are onscreen for such a short period that there is just no way an audience is going to leave the theater an hour later remembering if Capt. Awesome wore a Seiko or a Swatch.” — Breitling has engineered a plan to help audiences recall its brand. Too bad the plan sucks.

Many may know Travolta as Breitling’s off-screen spokesman, apearing in ads reading “Profession: Pilot Career: Actor.”Well, in the remake The Taking of Pelham 123, Travolta’s character Ryder also wears a Breitling, which he checks regularly… to see if it’s time to start executing hostages. 

What is the connection here? Is Breitling really of the opinion that just being onscreen, for any amount of time, in any context, is good for its brand? That this will sell product? That the Pelham placement will be reinforced by the off-screen pilot-John magazine ads? Who knows. But one thing is for sure, those few that do make the connection are more likely to be turned off by the incongruity than turned on by the brand’s… ubiquity.

Not that this sort of thing hasn’t happened before. The Island featured a mind-blowing meta-placement real-world Calvin Klein ad woven into the fictional story. But in that case at least the real-world and fictional characters were somewhat similar. Then again, maybe John Travolta is really an evil terrorist, masterfully using his onscreen appearances to destroy film after film.

This poorly though out catastrophe is exactly the kind of thing that gives product placement the bad name is so often deserves.