Free Ride

In Consumed: Wonder Bread: What a hit movie can do for a venerable brand — and vice versa.

The proliferation of product and brand placement in movies and television programming has become so extreme that it’s barely noted anymore. An exception to this is the attention focused on the prominent inclusion of the Wonder Bread logo in the recent Will Ferrell vehicle “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.” Given that the comedy is set in the world of Nascar racing, where every car and every driver moves about in a branded sheath, it was inevitable that nearly every frame of the film would be cluttered with logos. What got people interested in Wonder’s inclusion is that the brand didn’t pay for it. Shortly after the film opened, a marketing consultancy called Joyce Julius & Associates issued a press release saying that “the Wonder Bread logo appeared clear and in focus for 11 minutes 32 seconds (11:32), while the brand was also mentioned on two occasions by the actors,” and that, it asserted, added up to media exposure worth $4.3 million. Another observer guessed that buying this level of exposure might have cost as much as $100 million. …

Continue reading at the NY Times Mag site via This Link.

Related link: Wonder/Ricky Bobby cap at Nascar online store. RetroCrush’s “Inside Look at Wonder Bread.”