The ad industry is reverse-engineering product placements into classic movies
Remember that classic scene in The Wizard of Oz when the Tin Man cracked a Bud Light? Or the moment in Saving Private Ryan when a tattered Coca-Cola billboard rustled in the breeze? Booze and Coke may not appear in the original films, but fear not: The ad industry has figured out how to retroactively splice billboards into the background and beers into the foreground of classic movies, BBC reports. It’s a new frontier for the secretive product placement industry, now worth an estimated $21 billion. Why worry about finding the next big sitcom when you can place a Papa John’s box in the back of an old Friends episode? It’s Mad Men meets Mad Max, and mad money will surely follow.
