In the cinema, brands are no longer content with supporting roles: from Barbie, which is released in theaters on Wednesday, to Michael Mann’s Ferrari or Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, they now provide the raw material for films. For the release of the feature film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the candy pink brand and its parent company Mattel are offering themselves maximum marketing exposure, all over the world, following in the footsteps of the Lego films that have invaded the screens.
“We always talk about product placement but that has nothing to do with what we did a century ago. The public has such closeness to the brands that it no longer poses a problem” to devote an entire film to it, explains to AFP Jean-Marc Lehu, management specialist at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University. “The idea is to highlight values, a personality or a role that the brand wants to give itself in society, adds Géraldine Michel, director of the brands and values chair at the IAE Paris-Sorbonne. People are seduced by these stories. Brands have taken the place of politics and religion, they create communities and movies are part of it. This is full-scale propaganda.”
Among the brands present on screen in the coming months, the most famous Formula 1 team could make the event at the Venice Film Festival in September. The author of Heat, Michael Mann, is expected to present his film Ferrari. Adam Driver plays the founder of the sports automobile firm in the late 1950s, when his company was on the verge of bankruptcy. The brand is no stranger to the cinema, already present in Le Mans 66 (Ford v Ferrari) in its original version, with Matt Damon and Christian Bale.
In the world of luxury too, the boundaries between cinema and brands are blurring. A decade after seeing its creator incarnated twice the same year on screen, by Pierre Niney and Gaspard Ulliel, the house of Yves Saint Laurent became in the spring the first luxury brand to found its own production company. The idea is to produce films with big names. Bet already successful in terms of exposure: his first work, the medium-length film Strange Way of Life, signed Pedro Almodovar, had the honors of the Cannes Film Festival.
Also within the Kering group, the Gucci family recently saw a film, House of Gucci, starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino and Jared Leto. Ridley Scott returns to it on the assassination of the heir to the Italian house, sponsored by his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani. The brand’s bags and accessories appear countless times on screen and actress Salma Hayek, also wife of Kering boss François-Henri Pinault, plays a role.
Many films about brands are less glamorous and often built on the same pattern, retracing the epic and sometimes the fall of a genius entrepreneur. Steve Jobs (Apple) inspired two films and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) was crunched in The Social Network with Jesse Eisenberg. But less famous figures also inspire, like the creator of McDonald’s (The Founder) or those of Blackberry, at the heart of a film that traces the rise and fall of an iconic brand of the 2000s, presented at the last Berlinale.
The genre has also become a goldmine for the platforms: on Amazon Prime Video, Air by Ben Affleck with Matt Damon tells the story of Sonny Vaccaro, the sports marketing director of Nike, when, on Apple TV, Tetris makes it possible to discover “the ‘incredible story of the most popular of video games’. The same platform promises for the end of July to tell in The Beanie Bubble, “one of the most unusual American success stories”: the story of the creator of the “big-eyed comforters” Ty, a must in children’s rooms.
