I’m surprised it has taken this long to catch on. From Dubbing In Product Plugs:
After decades of dubbing dialogue into the movies they send around the world, Hollywood studios have taken the next step: dubbing product placements.Digital technology has made it easy and inexpensive to substitute one product plug for another in the domestic and overseas versions of the same movie. And it gives studios a new stream of revenue when they can sell product-placement rights not only in the U.S. but also overseas.
The practice actually goes back a decade:
The practice actually dates back to a pioneering effort in the 1993 futuristic police drama “Demolition Man.” Pepsico Inc. bought a major role for its Taco Bell brand in the U.S. release, which depicted the fast-food chain as a candlelight establishment and “the only restaurant to survive the franchise wars.” But in the overseas version of “Demolition Man,” the featured restaurant was Pizza Hut, another Pepsico brand.
Spiderman 2 featured Dr. Pepper in the US, and a fruit-flavored soft drink called Miranda overseas. Looney Tunes: Back in Action featured Sprint cellphones in the US; overseas, the phones had the orange square logo of Orange, France Telecom’s mobile unit. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle features a Cingular Wireless camera phone; it’s T-Mobile overseas.
All this isn’t cheap and easy…yet:
It can cost from $10,000 to $90,000 to dub a logo into a short scene. The process has become simpler and cheaper over the years as more special-effects agencies offer dubbing services. As more movies are shot with digital cameras, instead of being filmed on conventional 35 mm film and then converted to a digital computer file, the cost is expected to go down still more, says Chris Taday, vice president of European promotions for Sony’s Columbia TriStar Films. “There are big brands in Europe for which we want to use films as promotional tools, and we want to leverage that,” Mr. Taday says.
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For now, product dubbing is largely confined to still shots: Dubbed products are usually little more than props in the background, because dubbing a moving object, frame by frame, is complicated. “It’s easy as long as a package of soap powder sits on a kitchen counter, but it’s more complicated when a housewife picks it up, or someone passes in front of her and you see only a piece of it,” says Norm Marshall, chief executive of NMA Entertainment & Marketing, Los Angeles. Eventually, movies could digitally alter the appearance of the same product for local markets, he adds. “Unilever may market the same soap product around the world, but the packaging and color may be different.”