Morgan Spurlock, former fame through the documentary Super Size Me, has thought of a whole new topic to subject himself to: product placement. In every film and TV show nowadays there’s a level of product placement in addition to the already invasive five to eight minutes of advertising we have to sit through for every half-hour of entertainment. Whether it be as subtle as the fact that a character is wearing a certain brand of sunglasses and no one ever talks about it, or as blatant as characters have a five minute discussion about which sandwich is the best sandwich that you can get from Subway. There was even the recent uproar on the internet about digitally revitalized marketing in syndicated shows.

Here however Morgan wants to get to the core of how this whole mass marketing tactic actually works. This isn’t just a look at it by talking to the people who participate in it, but by participating in it himself by actually making the documentary completely funded by advertising and playing into the hands of the advertisers themselves. So Spurlock, as well as us, are getting a first-hand look into this darker side of advertising.

Before you walk into this movie you’re probably going to have your own views on advertising, and possibly your own views on product placement advertising, and this film doesn’t try to change that at all. If you’ve ever worked in a situation where you’re dealing with a client to client basis then you know how hard it can be to juggle all of these egos and demands in such a way to keep everyone happy and not make everyone feel like you’re giving priority to one client over the other, as you can imagine happens in bigger budget films like Transformers with as they try to decide whether GM or Apple gets more play in the film. Here however while the product placement is blatant, to the point where there are a few instances of Spurlock showing 30 second TV spots that he’s produced for these sponsors, it works due to the transparent nature of the film.

Where true interest comes is in some of the more ridiculous instances of marketing. Spurlock talks with media experts and advertising analysts who’ve studied the psychological effect of advertising and use it as an explanation as to how we view media today and also how to manipulate you with that media, which is not just helpful but downright brilliant information for someone such as myself who’s constantly asking the question, “who the hell would want that?” whenever I see an ad on TV. One set of interviews that I enjoyed the most were in the town of Sao Paolo, which I didn’t know had outlawed all outdoor advertising and you get to see the general difference in the people now that they’re no longer having to read ad after ad after ad.

Spurlock even has a few filmmakers, including Quentin Tarantino, J. J. Abrams and Brett Ratner, and have them talk about product placement. Some deal with how they don’t mind the act of product placement as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story that they’re telling, which I can say is a pretty okay stance for the moment.

This film works for the same reason that Super Size Me worked. We attach ourselves to Spurlock and his journey to find out more about this new monster that’s been created thanks to us putting as much effort as possible to avoid being sold by DVRing TV shows and reading all of our news on the internet where ads hasn’t quite hit the mass level that print media is at now.

Rating: 7.0/10