The New York Times

September 17, 2006

Free Ride

BYLINE: Rob Walker

The proliferation of product and brand placement in movies and television programming has become so extreme that it's barely noted anymore. An exception to this is the attention focused on the prominent inclusion of the Wonder Bread logo in the recent Will Ferrell vehicle ''Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.'' Given that the comedy is set in the world of Nascar racing, where every car and every driver moves about in a branded sheath, it was inevitable that nearly every frame of the film would be cluttered with logos. What got people interested in Wonder's inclusion is that the brand didn't pay for it. Shortly after the film opened, a marketing consultancy called Joyce Julius & Associates issued a press release saying that ''the Wonder Bread logo appeared clear and in focus for 11 minutes 32 seconds (11:32), while the brand was also mentioned on two occasions by the actors,'' and that, it asserted, added up to media exposure worth $4.3 million. Another observer guessed that buying this level of exposure might have cost as much as $100 million.

That seems on the high side, but it's no surprise that Wonder's corporate parent, Interstate Bakeries, was happy to sign off on Wonder's presence in the film, on a variety of collateral Ricky Bobby products (hats, toy cars, etc.), ads for the film and even Sprint ads featuring the Ricky Bobby character. The company's chief marketing officer, Rich Seban, says that Ferrell himself wrote Wonder into the script because ''it's one of his favorites.'' While Seban says that it will take a while to gauge any actual impact on sales, Wonder's star turn ''was great for the brand in terms of contemporizing it with people, having fun, showing that we're not so serious about ourselves.''...