Brand placement in Avatar

As Avatar’s worldwide gross continues to climb beyond $2.5 billion, hundreds of millions of people will have spotted the only two brands that feature in that movie: the U.S.M.C., and Stanford.

People have wondered if Stanford paid for that placement, but it turns out that not only did Stanford not pay for it, no one even asked it for permission before featuring Sigourney Weaver’s character’s avatar’s logo-adorned cardinal-colored tank top in the film.

Lapin has received a fair number of calls about Avatar since the movie’s release. “People have asked if we paid for the reference,” she says. “There are universities that do that, but we do not; we don’t even provide the shirts. We send them to the Bookstore.”

That’d be right. They stick a big “S” on something and suddenly the $10 hoodie you can buy from Walmart is $50 in the bookstore. Of course, Stanford is quick to say that if it had been asked, “it absolutely would have been something we would have approved.” Naturally. The estimated value of free publicity is nothing to sneeze at:

The value of being seen in a box-office hit of such magnitude “is obviously massive,” says Jeff Greenfield, editor of the online newsletter Product Placement News. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (figuring a total of 30 seconds of movie exposure, times the likely total box office, DVD and broadcast TV impressions, times the typical cost of a 30-second U.S. TV advertisement per thousand views) has him estimating, very conservatively, that the Cardinal shirt represents around $3 million in advertising value to the school.

The real reason for the Farm’s appearance in the film is because Sigourney Weaver is a Stanford alumna and it was her idea.

  7:46pm  •  Movies  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Letter from America

Dad recently wrote me an email which got onto the topic of Alistair Cooke:

Years ago, whenever I could, I would tune to the BBC on short wave radio [from Singapore], and listen to Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America, with its accompanying static and waning and waxing signal strength (no internet radio then). It was a 15 minute weekly radio broadcast by him touching on his observations in America. He was a Britisher who emigrated to the States in the 1930s and settled in New York. His program started in the 1940s and ran continuously for nearly 60 years till just before his death in 2004 at a ripe old age of 95.

A few years ago, I bought a book which is a compendium of some of his “Letters to America”. Reading it, somehow it was not as enjoyable as hearing him speak on the radio. Thankfully throughout all these years he never manage to lose his British accent.

After 58 years of broadcasts, Letter from America remains the longest running speech radio show in the world. This is Cooke’s first letter and his last letter. There are audio links on those pages too so you can hear his voice. Good stuff.

  6:30pm  •  General Media  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

The William Rehnquist you didn’t know

The ABA journal has an interesting article about the late Chief Justice Rehnquist.  I’m not sure I could picture what a CJ’s weekend would look like, but in any event, this wasn’t it.

Bill’s loneliness after the death of his wife, Nan, in 1991 was apparent to anybody who saw him regularly. He did not try to hide it.

At our Sunday morning tennis games, I could tell that Saturday nights were the loneliest of the week for him. After routine greetings, he would almost always ask what my wife, Betty Nan, and I had done the previous evening. I would describe a typical suburban couple’s Saturday night (dinner with friends, neighborhood party, movies, a charity event, etc.). Bill would then sometimes tell me about a quasi-official party that sounded glamorous but that he found tedious. More often he would describe a dinner of hot dogs, canned vegetables and ice cream followed by an evening with the TV remote. (For more than a dozen years he prepared most of his own meals, but he always considered cooking a chore, rather than a creative pleasure.)

Quite sad, but very human. It turns out that the Chief Justice loved to bet, as well:

Betty Nan, Bill and I began betting on elections shortly after the death of Bill’s wife, Nan, in 1991. In the beginning, it was simple. We each bet $1 on one or two close races, shook hands and paid off the next time we had dinner together. But in a few years, without deliberate planning, the scope of our betting expanded. The money involved remained insignificant. The wagering terms, however, became complicated. On some Election Days we each wagered a dollar on two dozen or more individual races. To add complexity and variety to our game, we changed the terms regularly. Sometimes we simply chose a winner. More often we wagered on spread, voter percentage or by what percentage each party would win in a legislature.

After our election cards grew lengthy and complicated, it became necessary to record our bets in writing. Conversation on movie dates during October often focused on how we would organize our betting cards for an upcoming election. The arrangement by which we exchanged our picks was efficient and easy. Betty Nan and I faxed our selections to Bill’s secretary and, after receiving our choices, she faxed Bill’s to us. This allowed the bettors to keep their choices secret.

I had some reticence about using the chambers of the chief justice of the United States as a betting parlor. But when I questioned Bill about it, he brushed me aside. “Janet loves being part of all this,” he explained.

Full article is here.

  8:11pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •