On this evening's The Right Hook, George welcomes The Picture Show's Philip Molloy live into the studio to take a look at the what we're looking at our our TV screens and at the movies. This week, Philip will review the biggest new releases, and take a critical look at product placement. 

Tune in live at 6.20pm: http://www.newstalk.com/player/ 

Every year, in the lead up the movie-awards season that dominates the cultural landscape for January and February, another website bestows an accolade for what we see on the silver screen. Or should that be, what we’re subjected to in a bid to reach deep into our pockets.

The Brandcameo Product Placement Awards shine a light on Hollywood’s relationship with brands and businesses, alerting the viewing public to the tacit marketing ploys used to normalise the everyday use of premium products by superheroes and geniuses with debilitating syndromes alike.

2014 was the year when Apple claimed the title of Overall Product Placement – its assorted high-spec tech products having featuring in nine of the top-grossing 35 movies at the US box office. But if you think of that award as Brandcameo’s version of Best Director, its Best Picture was awarded to the CGI juggernaut Transformers: Age of Extinction. The Michael Bay movie, universally panned by critics, took the Achievement in Product Placement in a Single Film prize, with 55 different products placed squarely on screen for the world’s cinemagoers to take in.

We live in a world surrounded by advertising, from pop up ads with ignore on websites through to neon signs that become a part of our environmental pop culture. Our exposure to these images runs into the hundreds and thousands every day, and our patience for and ability to even notice them has begun to wane. We install ad-blocking plug-ins to our browsers rather than endure five-second delays to our YouTube watching, or we fast-forward through the commercial breaks in the shows we’ve recorded on TV – assuming we’ve not abandoned scheduled viewing for the Internet subscription packages.

This is why product placement, or ‘embedded marketing’ to give it its rebranded title, has become an essential tool in the marketers arsenal. And an effective one; when Steven Spielberg featured Reece’s Pieces in his family-favourite E.T. in 1982, the product saw a 65 percent bump in sales. When Toy Story’s Woody asked the Etch-a-Sketch board to draw in a 12-second segment in the 1995 movie, sales skyrocketed that Christmas and actually saved the compant from liquidation.

But the issue isn’t really about whether product placement benefits a company, but rather what influence it has on the viewer?

Psychological research has drawn a direct link between implicit attitudes and impulse behaviour. How we feel about a TV programme or film and the emotions we experience while watching them get transferred to the products we see on screen, of which we are blissfully unaware. If the emotions are positive, we prefer the products, if negative, we won’t. Which is why a number of product-placement deals involve only showing a brand in a positive light.

But product placement doesn’t have to be so prominent, proving to be just as effective when only glimpsed in the background. Here, instead of trying to create an emotional response with a positive spin, the markets hope to create a sense of implicit self-identification. When we watch a character drinking a specific type of whiskey or using a specific type of smartphone, we begin to identify with that brand automatically, vicariously piggybacking on the character’s lifestyle. And worse still, we still do it anyway even when we know that we’re being manipulated.

Brands pay big sums of money to be included in the media we consume, and product placement is a part of that. And it really does work. The only way to protect ourselves from it is to shut off the TV and never go to the cinema.

Brandcameo’s awards might just be the online press skewering product placement for fun, but they the site does remind every cinemagoer that the adverts haven’t disappeared from the screen just because the opening credits have started to roll.