HBO's peculiar policy about product placement

Although HBO's vice-president for communications Michelle Boas claims that they “do no product placement”¹, the channel's audience can still remember one or two famous cases of the sort. The argument is that "[i]f Carrie on Sex and the City is drinking Tropicana, it's because that's what Carrie would drink."² But Carrie does not only drink juice. She also evolves in a high-class society where style is related to fashion which is related to fashoin which in turn is related to brandnames. For my part, before watching Sex and the City, I barely knew about New York City, and even less so about its fashionable outfits. In one episode I got to learn so many brandnames that I felt like Charlie in the chocolate factory, mostly when Carrie Bradshaw visited Vogue, since in the series she became one of their columnists. 

Needless to say that poor old Carrie is obviously not the one to blame for such a capitalist society: avoiding mentioning brandnames would seem silly and not verisimilar. The same goes for every HBO fiction: verisimilitude is what matters the most, and I agree with that although I live in a country – France – where brandname dropping is so frowned upon that labels are masked with a piece of duct tape.

Sometimes, however, brandname dropping goes up a notch. Carrie Bradshaw may drink Tropicana but Samantha Jones assuredly drinks Absolut vodka, and more precisely Absolut Hunk cocktails. In "Hop, Skip, and a Week" (606) she gets her boyfriend Jerry/Smith an ad campaign for Absolute vodka. The viewers discover the opportunity as they get a glimpse at the digitally added billboard on Times Square³.

In her 2003 article, Clarie Atkinson explained that for the occasion, negotiations took place “between the show's producers at HBO, Absolut, and its entertainment agency, Ketchum”. Although it cannot be deemed product placement as the process “did not involve any money changing hands”, it is rather close. Nevertheless, this quid pro quo – as I may call it – is not as gratuitous as it first appears. 

There is a strong textual basis to the episode that is to be found in the book Sex and the City, an anthology of the columns published by Candace Bushnell in the New York Observer between 1994 and 1996. The chapter 14 of the book entitled Portrait of a “Bulgy Underwear Model: The Bone Pops Out of His Giant Billboard” was actually entitled “Portrait of a Bulgy Calvin Klein Hunk” when published as a column in the New York Observer on March 13, 1995⁴. Whereas the book does not read the hunk once, this is in the original column that one can find the original term, as well as the mention of a brandname, making the Sex and the City episode into a return to the origins, a faithful translation of the column's spirit. Hence, the last season of the series makes a detour by what it had left more or less after the first season, and that is the original Candace Bushnell tone. The column reads

“He’s that guy who was splashed — muscled, naked except for a white skein of underwear — on that giant billboard for Calvin Klein in Times Square, and he was all over the buses”,

which is echoed by the series. In her article, Claire Atkinson mentioned that an ad agency “drafted to create a campaign tailored specifically for the scriptwriters' needs” which should mean that a certain number of features were already set and that the agency only had to fill in a few blank spots. Hence, the billboard idea resurfaces form the past, becoming the reminder of the column inside the diegesis, and winking at the viewers, with the tagline "Absolut Hunk" referring to the original chapter title. 

The visual of the poster also reminds the attentive viewer of the 1995 context when there had been yet another Calvin Klein ads controversy about their lack of propriety. However, the poster is not only a reference to the past; it also anchors Sex and the City in the present – that is the time of the series' original broadcast in 2003. It also bears ressemblance to the 2002 Yves Saint Laurent's M7 campaign ads, whose stark naked version was displayed in French magazines and streets. I can still remember catching a glimpse of them on my way to college.

The intertextual references are numerous and what looked like a simple fake campaign using a real product no longer seems as simple as a banal product placement. It is a hybrid phenomenon that blurs the limit between fiction and reality, using the bread and butter of capitalism to do so, that is commodities and brandnames.

These objects trigger even more desire for both products, because one should not forget that HBO series are products and some of their major currencies are their appeal to audience, hipness, and word-of-mouth. One has to admit that crossing the barrier in this highly written and prepared fashion is exciting.

Regarding product placement Westworld is no I, Robot and the products that are used in the diegesis actually ensure that a certain coherence is kept throughout the narrative. Even more than a simple coherence, the products provide a certain subconscious level to the series, something that is conveyed to the viewers through the eyes without anybody saying anything about it, generating a very specific mood. Hence, it plays the same role as any other intertext, to the only difference that it specifically concerns commodities. This is one of the reasons why Westworld is all the more compelling; it offers a specific view on our own everyday lives – yes, it does – using familiar elements.