Film: Ice Age: Continental Drift (20th Century Fox)
Total Products Spotted: 0
Standout Placement: N/A
Most Memorable Placement (positive): N/A
Most Memorable Placement (negative): N/A
Overall Product Placement Integration Grade (1-10): N/A
Comments: It's a real challenge to justify brand-based references and jokes in a film that's mean to take place tens of thousands of years ago. It's even harder to legitimately place a product on the screen. That's why product placement in animated features set in Ye Olde Pre-Marketing Times is scarce and left to contemporary kid pics like Madagascar 3 while, like ancient Scotland-set Brave, the Ice Age franchise — the new #1 movie at the box office following the weekend opening of Ice Age: Continental Drift — is left to drift product placement-less. Offscreen, however, the film put together a wooly mammoth's worth of tie-ins and marketing muscle, well beyond augmented reality and a Dark Knight Rises spoof. Continue reading...

In addition to the expected kids' marketing tie-ins such as a McDonald's Happy Meal promotion, Ice Age: Continental Drift  opens in movie theaters today with a mobile campaign it hopes moviegoers will find cool: GoldRun’s augmented reality mobile app.

Using the free photo app, available for iPhone and Android, fans can pose with more than a dozen characters, including Scrat, narrated by Chris Wedge, Manny (Ray Romano), Diego (Dennis Leary) and Sid (John Legquizamo), from the fourth film (expected to top the box office this weekend) in the wildly popular Ice Age series.Continue reading...