Product Placement Example

An Example of Product Placement in Movies

(CNN) -- In "The Internship," co-stars Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson share the screen with a somewhat demanding co-star: Google.

The comedy, which hits theaters Friday, is about two middle-age watch salesmen who overcome career obsolescence and a complete lack of tech savvy to join Google's internship program in hopes of scoring a job at the giant tech company.

Most of "The Internship" was filmed not at Google but on the Atlanta campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology, where the film crew turned a shiny new student commons building into a replica of Google's California headquarters. Even so, the Google brand -- Gmail, YouTube, Nexus tablets and so on -- appears extensively throughout the movie. (Google Glass, the company's connected eyewear that's currently being beta tested, is not in the film.)

Such product placement is increasingly common in Hollywood, which is always looking for ways to defray the escalating costs of film and TV production.

Typically, there are two kinds of product placement: natural and paid. When a company pays to get its soda, car or website into a movie, the camera lingers on it lovingly for an extra moment. Think of the BMW car scenes in a James Bond movie or Peter Parker using Bing as his search engine in "The Amazing Spiderman." On TV, most of these more brazen product shots are usually thrown in for free as part of a larger ad buy deal.

"If [it's] blatant and obvious enough that it's taking you out of the story, there's a pretty good chance that was a paid placement," said Jon Holtzman, who was the director of worldwide brand marking for Apple in the 1980s and early 90s and started its product placement program.

But brands don't always have to pay, especially when their name is as respected as Google or Apple.

Natural product placement is a more casual arrangement, where a company loans its products free of charge in the hopes of getting some exposure. They might...