Product Placement in a Hollywood Blockbuster

After watching the Generation Like documentary, I felt as if I had a heightened awareness of the advertising going on in the media around me. It was all very fresh in my mind when I sat down with my family on Friday night during the “blizzard” *insert eye-roll emoji here* to watch Jurassic World. One of the first things I noticed about the movie was that the main character drives a Mercedes. And every time she drives it, the Mercedes logo can be clearly seen more than once during the scene. I first noticed the logo placement at the beginning of the movie, and I made a mental note to keep my eyes open to any other subliminal advertisements… and by the end of the movie, I had racked up a quite a long list. There was even a scene in the movie that depicted the business aspect of the theme park where they discussed advertising, something about naming a new dinosaur after Verizon Wireless. It was an advertisement within an advertisement within a movie. Ad-ception, if you will.

Now, it’s highly doubtful that someone is going to go out and buy a Mercedes just because they saw one in Jurassic World. But, if someone is considering buying a new car anyway, that product placement could definitely have swayed them in that direction. Because hey, this car is fast enough to get away from a dinosaur. What else can it do?

There were so many other advertisements all throughout the movie, which you can find here: www.bustle.com/articles/89914-jurassic-world-product-placement-you-might-not-have-caught-while-running-from-the-dinosaurs-on-the, some of which I didn’t even notice. Some smaller things that appear, like Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville and a Pandora Jewelry store, are most likely intended to give the audience a small laugh. Who wouldn’t want to commemorate their Jurassic World vacation with some weird little $200 dinosaur charm bracelet?

Jurassic World as a whole did a really effective job of product placement. Because even if it seemed funny or ironic, it made an impression just the same.

Feminism 101: An Online Crash Course

The word “feminism” was never defined to me until I was well out of high school. Until my freshman year of college, I, along with entirely too many other young women, had shied away from the word. Because okay, yes, “gender equality.” That sounds nice. I want that. But feminism? No, I’m not a feminist. Come on, Feminists are crazy. That’s not me. But at sixteen, no one ever told me that those two statements back to back completely negated each other. Because no one ever told me that the fight for gender equality is the very basis of feminism. Equal rights for men and women. They are the same thing. And I don’t know why no one ever clarified that, because for some reason most of us were raised thinking that feminism had an extremely negative connotation. Hearing the word “feminism” brought to mind the picture of some sort of angry female revolution, a mob of fuming women invading the streets and waving picket signs that say “down with the patriarchy” while rioting and setting fire to city buildings. Which, by the way, has never happened. That I know of.

The first person who ever straight up defined feminism for me was Emma Watson. Yeah. Hermione from Harry Potter taught me what it meant to be a feminist. I had been absentmindedly scrolling through Facebook one day when I came across an article that had been posted by the actress’ Facebook page. The word “feminism” in the title caught my attention, along with the rest of the headline… something along the lines of “it’s not what you think it is.” So I was all like “Okay then Hermione, let me have it. What is feminism, really?”

One click. A two page article. A three minute video. That’s all it took to reverse years of preconceived notions and misconceptions about feminism.

So then I did my research. Google gave me a surprisingly long list of female celebrities who had begun to identify themselves as feminists, as well as individual links to click on for each one. The entire feminist world, one that I hadn’t even known existed at all, was suddenly at my fingertips. After reading through as much as I could consume in one sitting, I walked away from my laptop feeling…smarter. I didn’t go to a class, but I felt educated. I wasn’t given a study guide, but I felt as if I could pass a test. I had learned more from the internet in ten minutes than I had in thirteen years of school.

I wonder now, if I had never come across that page, what I would be saying today to people who ask if I am a feminist. Granted, I don’t actually get that question a lot. Or like, ever. But if someone were to ask me that before I took the liberty of educating myself on the subject, I would still be saying “Yeah no, I’m definitely not a feminist. Don’t put me in the same category as them. I don’t want that label.” But today, if I were to get that question… “Are you a feminist?” I would say yes. And I would be able to say why. And then I would pull out my phone and be able to give that person a very long, very detailed list of articles, videos, interviews, and links regarding why they should be too.