Brand placement in Avatar
As Avatar’s worldwide gross continues to climb beyond $2.5 billion, hundreds of millions of people will have spotted the only two brands that feature in that movie: the U.S.M.C., and Stanford.
People have wondered if Stanford paid for that placement, but it turns out that not only did Stanford not pay for it, no one even asked it for permission before featuring Sigourney Weaver’s character’s avatar’s logo-adorned cardinal-colored tank top in the film.
Lapin has received a fair number of calls about Avatar since the movie’s release. “People have asked if we paid for the reference,” she says. “There are universities that do that, but we do not; we don’t even provide the shirts. We send them to the Bookstore.”
That’d be right. They stick a big “S” on something and suddenly the $10 hoodie you can buy from Walmart is $50 in the bookstore. Of course, Stanford is quick to say that if it had been asked, “it absolutely would have been something we would have approved.” Naturally. The estimated value of free publicity is nothing to sneeze at:
The value of being seen in a box-office hit of such magnitude “is obviously massive,” says Jeff Greenfield, editor of the online newsletter Product Placement News. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation (figuring a total of 30 seconds of movie exposure, times the likely total box office, DVD and broadcast TV impressions, times the typical cost of a 30-second U.S. TV advertisement per thousand views) has him estimating, very conservatively, that the Cardinal shirt represents around $3 million in advertising value to the school.
The real reason for the Farm’s appearance in the film is because Sigourney Weaver is a Stanford alumna and it was her idea.
7:46pm 
