Shake and Bake the product placement

Talladega Nights, Directed by Adam Mckay and stars Will Ferrell is the king of product placement. Name a more dynamic duo than comedy and NASCAR to promote products? (Ill wait…see what I done there?)

NASCAR is one of, if not the biggest sport involved with advertising and promoting. Talladega Nights isn’t your average Joe style movie, where subtle, but obvious hints at products are placed in movies, such as actors bending over elegantly to tie their new exclusive Nike shoes, it’s the complete opposite. It’s a shove it in your face in the most deliberate way possible. It’s so good its bad.

The movie displays a numerous amount of products such as…

·      Powerade

·      Wonder bread

·      Old Spice

·      Dixies

·      Applebee’s

These are amongst the more consistent and dominant products used throughout the movie. The good thing about these product placements is how they don’t take the audience away from the plot or story and I believe the blatant cross product placement adds to the comedy affect, which doesn’t really work in other movies.The two products I believe stood out to me the most are “Powerade” (because its delicious…see what I done there again?) and Applebee's.

Will Ferrell character Ricky Bobby is a successful NASCAR driver who has a numerous amount of sponsorships, with Powerade being one of his top ones. In one of the scenes where Ricky and his family are sitting at the table about to eat dinner, Ricky says grace and I quote says “…due to a binding endorsement contract that stipulates I mention PowerAde at each grace, I just wanna say that PowerAde is delicious and it cools you off on a hot summer day and we look forward to Powerade release of mystic mountain blueberry. Thank you, for all your power and your grace, Dear Baby God, Amen” in the scene you can see Ricky Bobby and one of his sons also wearing a Powerade sport jacket. Personally I would say this quality product placement and is hands down one of the funniest scenes in the movie. People remember funny scenes and when a product like Powerade is connected to it makes it even easier to remember.

In Another scene during a race between Ricky Bobby and his new French rival, both cars plummet into a dramatic crash, whilst the two cars are in the air the commentators announce it’s a good time to go into a commercial and during the peak of this movie, BANG. An Applebee’s commercial. I personally thought this was an incredible placement for this since Applebee’s is constantly spoken about in the movie, but I could see this potentially being a negative with some viewers that they had a full on commercial broadcasted in the middle of an important part of the movie, however I’m not them people and thought it was absolutely brilliant. I have never came across any movie that has used this style of product placement and been so successful.

Whenever I have Powerade or go to Applebee’s, the first thing I think of is this movie and I start to laugh to myself and tell whomever I am with about the movie. Overall I would give Talladega Nights product placement scheme a 4 out of 5 stars. I took away one star because I realise this isn’t everybody’s style and realize some negative do come with this sort of tactic Adam McKay took when creating this movie.