Product Placement
Thursday, July 17 2008 | Comments (0)
Contemplating the DieHard Logo
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games ... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
--Futurama-"A Fishful of Dollars"
Like it or not, product placement is part of our culture. In TV shows, movies, magazines and novels, advertisers pay big bucks to have their product splayed across a screen where everyone can take note.
If you look at any American Chopper show, you'll see a plethora of products on display. Aside from the ubiquitous OCC logo on shirts, caps, walls and bikes, the show often displays batteries, tires, oil, motorcycle part suppliers, and of course, the sponsor of the latest theme bike.
This should be no surprise as American Chopper's business model IS product placement. OCC's success is largely due to their strategy of creating custom theme bikes for large corporations, who pay big money to get a bike built to display their product. Corporations are falling all over themselves trying to be the next on TV build, but even if they aren't on the show, the prestige of owning an OCC custom chopper has value in and of itself. OCC also wins because they get paid big bucks to create the bike and the bike is it's own ad for their services, so they get lot of free advertising.
While some bikes are done purely for charity (the Fire Bike) and some for fun (Mikey's Blues Bike), even most charity bikes are done for a corporation so both giving and receiving are inextricable bundled. It can't be otherwise, people tend to give more to high visibility charities recommended by someone they know and trust--like the Teutuls. Paulie says, "the best part of fame is being in a position to give."
While building theme bikes is OCC's lifeblood, the Teutuls are picky about what corporations they will do business with. They won't do alcohol or tobacco, political parties or "girlie magazines." In Paulie's opinion, this is one thing that has helped them land some of their bigger contracts. Corporations have weighed OCC's character and not just their technical expertise before deciding to do business with the Teutuls.
Count the logos!
It isn't just big corporations that benefit from product placement on the show. Smaller products and suppliers get international exposure too. Master detailer Nub Graphix has benefited from the popularity of the show, as has frame manufacturer Rolling Thunder Frames, paint coat Orange Co Powder Coating and Tarjac, to name only a few.
Nielsen reports placed American Choppers as the #1 product placement show on cable TV with almost 30,000 separate placement incidents (last year, Dog the Bounty Hunter was #2 with 12,000+, this year it's Project Runway with 16,000+). To be fair, many of those "placements" are the OCC shirts and hats that everyone on the show wears, as well as various OCC bikes and bike accessories. "The cable shows have much more product placement because more shows are built around brands. So Orange County Cycle apparel pops up a lot in “American Chopper,” accounting for more than 6,000 appearances all by itself." says a Nielsen spokesperson.
Sometimes the placement is heavy-handed, as in the Craftsman Diehard episode which began with every mechanic at OCC ordering tools from Craftsman to show that they use Craftsman tools exclusively (if they already used Craftsman would they have needed to order any?). In the same episode, a representative from Diehard started a bike with a battery frozen in a block of ice and Mikey built a battering ram "powered exclusively by Diehard batteries."
Most of the time though, the placement is more subtle and the product is just there in the background, in use, but not in your face. Despite the extent of product placement in American Chopper, most of it is just part of the show.
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