At the Movies: SOPA and Product Placement

Texas Rep. Lamar Smith's now-pulled SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) bill ruled the week when it comes to Hollywood. Tinsel Town lobbyists pushed for a heavy-handed approach toward online copyright piracy, and the Internet heavyweights in Silicon Valley and beyond pushed back. Hard.

One detail lost in the debate was the SOPA product placement paradox: How Hollywood's revenue stream of product placements benefit from piracy.

Copyright owners of movies were pushing the SOPA/PIPA legislation to clamp down on the free sharing of their products online. They claim billions of dollars in lost revenues, and they have a valid gripe.

But it's arguable that the product placements that Hollywood increasingly depends on benefit greatly from illegal internet sharing. Consider Fast Five, the fifth installment of the Fast and Furious series, featured one of the best, most impactful product placements of the year for Dodge Charger.

According to TorrentFreak, Fast Five was the #1 pirated movie of 2011, logging 9.26 million downloads. That means, potentially, 9.26 million more consumers were exposed to Dodge's awesome role in the film than would have otherwise been.

TorrentFreak's list also includes Source Code, I am Number Four and 127 Hours, all of which featured heavy product placement.

Does Dunkin' Donuts benefit from the heavy sharing of Source Code? How about that I am Number Four's role for iPhone ? And 127 Hours was, while critically acclaimed, filled with corporate logos, for everyone from Pepsi to Capital One.

By TorrentFreak's numbers, the top-line product placement and brand partners of those three movies benefitted from 24,080,000 additional views than they would have otherwise. Even as studio execs fret about DVD sales, are the brand managers who are winning these millions of "unearned" eyeballs and exposures all that upset about piracy?

This week also brings us Underworld: Awakening, the latest installment of the future sexy vampires verses future wolverines. It is up against the smash-mouth spy thriller Haywire. It's guns product placement vs. guns product placement. Snore.

Then there is Red Tails, the action packed look at the contribution of the African American pilots known as the Tuskeegee airmen. Set during World War 2, it might seem there would be few opportunities for product placement tie-ins. But Jeep, the Yank brand that won the war, has smartly partnered with Lucasfilm to support the film. It's certainly a more organic brand partnership than Jeep's Black Ops Special edition based on the video game.

This week's truest product placement comes from the documentary (at top) with the tagline: "Sex. Drugs. Fame. Fabric." Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston is all about the 1970's legend Halston, and it's going to be dripping in glam brands of the era.