Abram Sauer Online

The poster for Middle Men certainly appears to boast a little Apple Product Placement.

After the jump, the Mac keyboard fro the poster.

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Top: In the finale, Iron Man is forced to face off against those who would use his technology for evil. Iron Man

Bottom: In the finale., Iron Man is forced to face off against those who would use his technology for evil. Iron Man 2

Queen Latifah’s new romantic comedy Just Wright gets its Mac product placement just right.

See the whole matrix at Brandchannel

Earlier I looked at how Audi is using heavy product placement of its R8 sports-car model to lift the brand’s overall image and how those placement were ramping up in 2010 with The Joneses and Date Night. Add one more; with the new Iron Man 2 trailer, it looks like Audi has Tony Stark in the brand’s driver’s seat once again.

Left: Tattooed, tortured man walking the line between doing right and doing wrong (Mystic River)

Middle: Tattooed, tortured man walking the line between doing right and doing wrong (Powder Blue)

Right:  Tattooed, tortured man walking the line between doing right and doing wrong (Brooklyn’s Finest)

I recently pointed out the product placement mind-f#*k that is the upcoming film The Joneses. Upon closer look it’s clear that Audi’s R8 is a huge beneficiary of that product placement (below).

No surprise. Audi’s is using the R8 to create an entirely new image for its brand. While the conjoined rings have had no trouble appearing in films (The Transporter series is essentially a trilogy of Audi commercials), the R8 says something more about the the pedigree of the automakers entire line: Sexy.

And it’s starting to turn up everywhere. From it’s role as the ride of Iron Man Tony Stark a few years ago to 17 Again and Transformers: Rise of the Fallen last year, to its upcoming appearances in The Joneses and Date Night, it’s becoming the product placement hot rod of choice… the Macbook of cars. Below, a few of the auto’s latest roles:

Now this is a mind-fuck. A movie about people surreptitiously selling things to others while at the same time surreptitiously selling its audience product placement. Bravo Hollywood marketing dudes, you are gods among men.

Here’s Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl in the upcoming film Killers (June 2010). That sure looks like a Mac, no?

Oh, THERE YOU ARE SILLY!

National Public Radio (90.7 in Wisconsin; <3) carried a round-table discussion with scientists on promoting reliable science and technology news?  One subject was how scientists could “spice up screenplays with science.”

The scientists recognized the idea of “product placement” as a powerful force. And some argued that there should eb an effort for “reality-based science” to be the “product”:

“Well, we actually recognize the power of Hollywood to inspire people, to inspire imaginations. When I was working as a journalist, I always would talk to scientists about what made them want to become a scientist. And invariably it would be a book they read, a movie they saw, or someone they met, but in general it was this entertainment industry.

It has the power to reach people with a very strong, inspiring message and it can get across very broad, general messages about, you know, the good or bad of science. And so this is a way of doing that by essentially finding a way to get entertainment people and scientists in a room together and talking.”

The panel discussed very specifically how it could work:

“It’s good when it’s done well. For many, many years I was on and still am - on advisory boards to Hollywood, and I keep trying to tell them that it’s not so much your job to tell the science story, but to tell the science process, because that’s not where people are going to get their science information, so you need an accurate thing.”

With some amusing anecdotes, speaking of The Day After Tomorrow:

“…big special effects. One of the things that our other speaker, Sid Perkowitz, brought up during our session was, okay, yeah, the science was ridiculous in terms of the time scales on which it happened, but it did have a measurable impact on people’s attitude towards climate change. People came out of there with a sense of immediacy and urgency that they did not get had they happen to see “Inconvenient Truth.”

Plus, it has scientists getting emotional about climate change deniers. Something you don’t always se. It is as enjoyable as it sounds:

“I completely agree and I got to put down the blogosphere. The blogosphere is one of the worst places to go for information, because, unlike Paul and others, most public people are not going to spend three hours a day doing this. We really need to reestablish the mainstream media in putting some specialists back in who can smell the north end of a southbound horse, because most general assignment reporters can’t and certainly their editors can’t.”

Listen to the whole wonderful thing.