Whiskey in the White House

It has become common knowledge that companies like to pay for their products to be subtly, or not so subtly, placed in popular media as a form of advertisement. Product placement, as it is called, has become a fact of life in our media and advertisement-crazed world, a fact of which many are quite critical. The goal is to be as stealthy as possible in including products in a television show or movie. However, advertisers are not always successful.

Product placement is so common that even the lefty, antiestablishment Aaron Sorkin used it in his script. For those unfamiliar with The West Wing, the character in this clip, Leo McGarry, was a very serious alcoholic. As he is talking about his drinking, the images on the screen include a shot that could have come out of a Johnnie Walker commercial of a bartender gently pouring this very expensive scotch ($30 a shot!) into a glass with two perfectly stacked ice cubes. Not only did Leo mention that he drank Johnnie Walker, giving the company a nice little name-drop, he extolled the virtues of the scotch that is aged twice as long as "very good scotch."

The goal of product placement is to be seamless. The viewer should not know that they are looking at an advertisement. That is what makes this a bad usage of the technique. Leo may be in a daze, talking about things he never talks about, but singing the praises of expensive liquor really has no place in this scene. Perhaps product placement would work better weaved in to some of Sorkin's machine-gun-like dialogue, where viewers aren't sure what the characters are saying half the time anyway.

What may be the most surprising thing about this advertisement is that Johnnie Walker thinks that even having their name associated with chronic alcoholism is good advertisement. Of all the characters in The West Wing who could have given Johnnie Walker their subtle endorsement, the man who was in rehab for alcoholism and drug abuse seems to be the least likely candidate. This says quite a bit about advertisers. They figure that consumers are more likely to associate their product with the positive description, not the negative association with any character, and they may be right.

Be like Leo McGarry and drink Johnnie Walker Blue, but don't be like Leo McGarry, and drink Johnnie Walker Blue responsibly.