Tobacco giants paid millions to Hollywood stars.

Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Bob Hope, Henry Fonda and other stars of Hollywood's "Golden Age" were paid millions of dollars in today's money for promoting cigarettes, a study ...

[Sheri]

Tobacco is a legal product and like all companies seeks ways to promote particular brands. Some tobacco companies use product placement in movies. Some car companies use product placement in movies. Some sportswear companies use product placement in movies. To single out tobacco and make it seem as if it is the only group who pays millions of dollars to have their brand names displayed in a movie is further proof of the idiocy of such "outrage" If the complaint is that movies should not use brand placement, then the rule should apply to all companies. There should be no prominent display of IPod or Nike or Hummers in movies. Of course that would limit the movie makers to what they could show in a movie, and that would lead to censorship. Perhaps none of these companies should be allowed to pay the movie makers to display brand names.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placemen...
As with any advertising, its effective tends to be proven by the fact that advertisers continue to use product placement as a marketing strategy. However, some consumer groups such as Commercial Alert object to the practice as "an affront to basic honesty",[3] which they claim is too common in today's society. Commercial Alert asks for full disclosure of all product placement arrangements, arguing that most product placements are deceptive and not clearly disclosed. They advocate notification before and during television programs with embedded advertisements. One justification for this is to allow greater parental control for children, whom they claim are easily influenced by product placement.
According to PQMedia, a consulting firm that tracks the product placement market, 2006 product placement was estimated at $3.07B rising to $5.6B in 2010. However, these figures are somewhat misleading in PQMedia's view in that today, many product placement and brand integration deals are a combination of advertising and product placement. In these deals, the product placement is often contingent upon the purchase of advertising revenues. When the product placement that is bundled with advertising is allocated to part of the spending, PQMedia estimates that product placement is closer to $7B in value, rising to $10B by 2010.
A major driver of growth for the use of product placement is the increasing use of digital video recorders (DVR) such as TiVO which enable viewers to skip advertisements.[citation needed] This ad skipping behavior increases in frequency the longer a household has owned a DVR.
[edit] Products
Certain products are featured more than others. Commonly seen are automobiles, consumer electronics and computers, and tobacco products.
[edit] Automobiles
The most common products to be promoted in this way are automobiles. Frequently, all the important vehicles in a movie or television serial will be supplied by one manufacturer. For example, The X-Files used Fords, as do leading characters on 24.

[Sheri]

The James Bond films pioneered such placement.[8] The 1974 film The Man with the Golden Gun featured extensive use of AMC cars, even in scenes in Thailand, where AMC cars weren't sold, and had the steering wheel on the wrong side of the vehicle for the country's roads. The last two Bond films had used vehicles from Ford or its subsidiaries. In Bad Boys 2 and The Matrix Reloaded, almost every car was made by General Motors, the only exception being the Ferrari in Bad Boys 2.
Other times, vehicles or other products take on such key roles in the film it's as if they are another character. In Desperate Housewives three of the characters drive Nissans, and the camera view often focuses on the Nissan symbol on someone's car, also the character Gabrielle Solis can also be seen driving an Aston Martin DB9 Volante prominently. Nissan cars also feature prominently in the 'Heroes' TV show, the logos often zoomed in/out of or whole cars shown for a few seconds at the beginning of a new scene. In The Matrix Reloaded, a key chase scene is conducted between a brand new Cadillac CTS and a Cadillac Escalade EXT. The chase scene also features a Ducati motorcycle in the getaway. Three of the James Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan featured a BMW car before fan outcry pressured the producers to return to using the traditional Aston Martin. In addition, a Shelby GT500 is used very extensively at the beginning of I Am Legend.
[edit] Consumer electronics and computers
The 2006 film Casino Royale features many Sony product placements throughout: A BD-R disc is prominently portrayed at one time, all characters use VAIO laptops, Sony Ericsson cell phones and GPSs, BRAVIA televisions, and a character uses a Cyber-shot to take photos.
Apple's products frequently appear in films and on television, Apple has stated that they do not pay for this.[9].(Notably, recognizable Apple products have appeared in newspaper comic strips, including Opus, Baby Blues, Non Sequitur, and FoxTrot, even though paid placement in comics is all but unknown.) In a twist on traditional product placement, Hewlett-Packard computers now appear exclusively as part of photo layouts in the IKEA catalog in addition to placing plastic models of its computers in IKEA stores, having taken over Apple's position in the Swedish furniture retailer's promotional materials several years ago. Hewlett-Packard also put their computers in the US production of The Office.
In video games, products that most often appear are placements for processors or graphics cards. For example in EA's Battlefield 2142, ads for Intel Core 2 processors appear on map billboards.

[Free_America]

Good points Sherry same points I made on our blog with the exception I did it showing that that big pharma uses celebs to promote there products ... from the blog.

The self proclaimed tobacco expert now claims that there was some sort of covert conspiracy between Hollywood and the tobacco companies. There was nothing sinister about it. Tobacco advertising was legal until 1969. Hiring celebrities to sell your product is a time honored tradition in advertising and is used to this day. Does anyone believe that Sally Fields is not getting paid for her ads for Boniva? Or how about Bob Dole and his Viagra commercials? Stanton Glantz tries to paint anyone who received a dime from tobacco companies as evil. Is any of the money that he has received from Big Pharma to spend on his crusades any more legitimate?
http://banthebanwisconsin.wordpress.com/2008/...