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ABSTRACT
Product placement constitutes an amply used tactic in a marketer’s Integrated Marketing Communications roster. Its merits in circumventing negative attitudes to advertising and in integrating brand values in sociocultural narratives in TV and cinematic filmic discourses have been repeatedly stressed. However, little attention has been placed thus far in the idiosyncratic mode that is scrutinized in this paper, that is product placement by leveraging uncertainty, surprise, postponement and displacement as defining characteristics of the discourse of desire. The analysis of the discourse of desire that unravels in a flirting sequence from the blockbuster movie “Hitch” demonstrates that although the concerned brand (Martini) is minimally visible in the analyzed scene, yet it attains to appropriate as part of its core DNA in “stealth” mode the above characteristics of desire by demarcating the cultural field of flirtation. The offered cultural analytic addresses this idiosyncratic product placement mode by drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis and multimodal discourse analysis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
George Rossolatos is an academic researcher, marketing practitioner and the editor of the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics (Department of English, Kassel University, Germany). Major publications include the Handbook of Brand Semiotics (2015; ed. and coauthor), Semiotics of Popular Culture (2015), Brand Equity Planning with Structuralist Rhetorical Semiotics (2012, 2014), //rhetor.dixit//: Understanding Ad Texts’ Rhetorical Structure for Differential Figurative Advantage (2013), Applying Structuralist Semiotics to Brand Image Research (2012), Interactive Advertising: Dynamic Communication in the Information Age (2002; ed. and coauthor), plus numerous articles in trade and academic journals. His research interests focus on new media and cultural studies, interpretivist consumer research, branding/advertising and span various disciplines such as rhetoric, semiotics, phenomenology, deconstruction, psychoanalysis and communication theory. Full CV downloadable from http://bit.ly/1cnUnVT.
Notes
1. The concerned scene, of 3 minutes and 10 seconds duration, may be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyT5UHDi4a0