Western Versus Eastern Product Placement

Devil in the background details.

'Product Placement' is the term we give to a very specific type of advertisement as it exists within entertainment. What we see as the breaking of the sanctity fictional world to introduce real world brands and logos, usually in the pursuit of subliminally advertising related products to the audience. Sure, you can hire the current James Bond actor to star in commercials driving your cars and wearing your watches so that movie fans will equate the suave and cool Bond with those products and thus seek them out in emulation, or you can literally show James riding an Aston Martin in the movie and let the prestige rub off from there. It's a very pervasive and well acknowledged branch of the advertising tree, if somewhat controversial depending on where you hail from and the marketing morals you grew up with. 

But what if I told you that somewhere out there, under the spectrum of differing cultures, some people don't just accept product placement but actually really love the idea of the real world infecting their virtual and fictional spaces? It's seems such a wild perspective in the West, where many of us are taught at a young age not just to recognise what we're being sold but to be actively weary of the idea of aggressive and subversive salesmanship. Remember how in the time before regulations were introduced, kids cartoons used to try to blend seamlessly with adverts in order to fool the child audience into the agency of the ad. Tell a kid that a toy version of the Transformer they were watching is in mortal peril unless they buy that very figure from the store, and the parents will have to endure endless nattering for the next few weeks. Nowadays we are sharpened to be more weary. Not only should I recognise the advertisers attempts to represent themselves and mentally separate it out of the contained story, but I should be aggrieved about the placement to begin with. I cannot speak for everyone, but that was a precedent I remembering being introduced and imbued into me during school; English Class. And yet I see that same sort of perception towards product placement all across America too.

And I think you know where I'm going with this, don't you? Over in the East, perception towards product placement tends to trend in the exact opposite fashion. Product placement isn't just accepted in films and games over there, but actually encouraged and preferred. In some small part due to the way that it works to ground fictional worlds that are supposed to be set within the recognisable and observable world we inhabit. Because afterall, if you're supposed to be watching a fictional story set within modern day Tokyo, wouldn't it make sense to see the same shops and brands that anyone would normally see when walking across Akihabara? That mindset doesn't just stop in places where it's fitting, however; as I'm sure most bewildered Western gamers came to see when they were confronted with Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding.

Now Death Stranding is a very emotionally intelligent game about forming connections across a bizarre post apocalyptic space seemingly purpose-built to encourage isolation. The America of that world couldn't be more conceptually distinct from the America of the real world in all manners except basic Insitutional fundamental values aped by the Bridges organisation. As such, there really is no reason on earth why Sam should have a replenishable stock of Monster Energy drinks at all of his bases. Nor is there any real reason why Sam should comment on 'Riding with Norman Reedus' when mounting certain bikes designed for tie-in promotion. They're both blatant slaps out of the immersion of the world which Western media consumers are taught to hate, but in inspection might actually serve some sort of artistic purpose. Really confronting the world of Death Stranding for what it is, and how it reflects the emotional state of a world drifting slowly apart, the fictional game world can actually seem dramatically heavy as it weighs on the soul with topics like extinction, repression and abject hope-crushing loneliness. Those small stabs of the outside world, shaking you out of magic box conceptual, can be seen as little lifelines by the designers, bringing us out of the world where everything seems so utterly insurmountable back to the real world, where things don't seem quite as bad in comparison. 

  

Of course, that is by no means the only style with which Japanese developers approach product placement. In Metal Gear Solid 3 you'll find many allusions to real brands among the tools you pick up, not least of which being Snake's favoured rations, his munch bars of Calorie Mate; a chronologically appropriate food item related to the role and world that character, as an American Green Beret, would have been part of. The Yakuza franchise too, smothers itself with brands and brand iconography in their wonderous depictions of various analogous Japanese districts. You'll find Sega Sammy branches, Don Quijote retail markets and innumerable in-print magazines and news rags stored in their isles. Yakuza even tends to feature real-life Japanese celebrities either in cameo roles or playing characters within or around their core stories, all just to sell the illusion that this is a Japan recognisable to the people who play. All in tune with a franchise quietly about celebrating modern Japanese culture.

Of course the Western world is no stranger to their own games seeped in a modern culture, but their approach to product placement is distinctly different. Look at Grand Theft Auto, a sardonic fun-house mirror thrown up across various aspects of America. Though the shape of the cities and people those games are set mimicking always bear some recognisable similarity to the real inspiration, you'll never find a real brand that has made the journey into the visual depiction unmolested. Instead you'll find parody after parody, brands depicted in a manner that is recognisable but slightly skewered to either fit a pun or just be legally distinct enough. 'Mustang' becomes 'Stallion', 'Ikea' becomes 'Krapea' (creative), 'Kawasaki' becomes 'Nagasaki', 'Sprite' becomes 'Sprunk'. (And there goes my appetite for lemonade.) And yet we don't see the world of GTA as an inferior depiction of a real-life location, to our sensibilities this all just makes sense.

It's so bizarrely common for Western games to conjure their own universe of similar sounding but crucially distinct corporate entities that I even see small scale indie games do it and I don't even think they know why. The amount of contemporary-setting indie games with their own version of Twitter and Instagram is so mind numbing that at this stage I'm actually more happy when the devs don't even bother and just reason neither company has the free time to sue their small studio over a literal nothing burger. And you can't tell me some part of you doesn't recoil everytime you watch a movie where a character has to look something up on the Internet and they scroll through a site that is the splitting image of Google but has a name like 'Goggle' or something equally as stupid. In some ways that sort of stuff knocks me out of the immersion more than the intentional product placement did.

At the end of the day I guess it all really comes down to the intention of the placement, which in turn informs the purpose of the set-up. If you go out to try and subconsciously get the audience to buy a Coke by placing that can in a scene with the logo conveniently turned in the direction of the camera, the contrived nature of that shot will shatter the otherwise carefully built moment. Litter the world with a sense of reality, using real brands as simply another means by which to convey that truth, and you'll have yourself a much more receptive audience to the brands present. Perhaps that is the key distinction between why the West intrinsically hates product placement and the East seems to love it. Of course, then I'm brought back to the Monster Energy in Death Stranding situation and it knocks me back out of understanding leaving me just asking 'why'. (I'd rather headbutt a Beached Thing than drink a Monster Energy myself...)