Product Tie Ins in the Movies - From Thai Land, Sing-a-Poore to London and Paris, Low-Cals are Big Business

West Coast Midnight Run™ is a copyrighted publication of Citadel Consulting Group LLC

Photos copyrighted and courtesy of Aston Martin

Top - Sean Connery and the Aston Martin DB5.

Bottom - A young lady shops a Cerruti Italian suits store with an Aston Martin front panel in the window

Product tie ins have a long history in the marketing and merchandising trades that go back to the age of Antiquity. When Paris eloped with Helen of Troy, the king of Sparta

bundled the sacking of the Kingdom of Troy in the bargain. Now that’s what we call a deal and a product tie in. Man oh man. Such fools have never existed that built nations.

Certainly not the Greeks. Even then leaders were more cynical than today’s biggest and most war weary. An entire kingdom was destroyed as to permit one individual the luxury of a beautiful princess? But to believe the legend of the wooden horse is to be double

dipping into myths that invoke interference from the gods - and that would help any munchkin swallow this much manure around dinner time.

Yet historians love being curators for these artifacts, promoting research and funding into building greater mystique and head scratching. What were they thinking of? Man oh man!

Product tie in have been huge business in the film industry. The Bond franchise is notorious for both explicit and sublime advertising. For the Aston Martin DB5, audiences now are sure this is the original Bond car, however the DB5 is a brand tie in that it has become closely intertwined with the Bond legend and franchise.

In Jurassic Park we saw another kind of tie in with the Mercedes Benz SUVs. In the more recent set of Bond features we also noticed a lesser subtle BMW product tie in. New BMW models were being launched with the Bond film premieres.

It’s nothing so subtle as the lesser noticed parts. Parts such as Hong Kong, Tokyo and other “exotic” filming locales are a product tie in for the Board of Tourism of that city that may or may not have partly financed the film since it conveys a level of urban sophistication and an atmosphere of luxury on many of its venues.