Lights. Camera. Marketing! What happens when selling is all the film's about?

Movie product placement has just thrown a curveball. What began with diamonds on red carpets became products written into plots, then whole films built around a toy or a ride. Which is all fair enough. But now AI can insert any brand into any scene, in any film, at any time, without reshooting a single frame. Over and over again. It's time to ask: will movies become nothing more than lengthy ads we pay to see?

---

Once upon a time, product placement in movies was the deal nobody mentioned. A watch on a wrist. A car in the driveway. A brand of smokes on the bar. The audience noticed, or didn't, and either way the film remained a film.

But now, that pact is looking very different, and this time, it’s not because Hollywood is getting even greedier. It's because a slice of AI software showed up at a hackathon in December 2025. Over one weekend, a piece of code did something the industry had spent decades building up to and suddenly, the future of movies and TV doesn’t look so bright.

But before we get to that, it's worth remembering how we got here, because the direction of travel in product placement has only ever been one way.

 

Products as scenery

 

Product placement's modern era starts in the 1950s with De Beers, the diamond monopolists. To get shot of a huge glut of stones, they spent a fortune persuading Hollywood stars to wear their sparklers at premieres and public events. To sell the dream of ownership to the masses. The ploy worked very well, because the hoi polloi showed up eager with their cash and have done ever since. Careful personal adornment had turned red carpets into diamond showrooms long before influencer marketing was born.

However, this was only surface gloss. Inside the films, brands still stayed in the background: a soft drink on a desk, a car in traffic. The placement was there to be noticed, not to matter. If you cut the brand out of the shot, the story worked exactly as before.

And that's really the test that separates each era of product placement from the next: could you remove the product and still have the same film? For the ten years or so after De Beers, the answer was mostly yes.

Then, in the 1960s, that stopped being true.

 

The plot thickens

 

Aston Martin's DB5 appeared in Goldfinger in 1964. Fitted with machine guns and an ejector seat, it became inseparable from James Bond as a character rather than a prop he merely drove. Take the car out of that film and you've taken out a plot device, a running joke, and a piece of the franchise's entire identity. Bond and Aston Martin have remained joined at the groin to this day.

Eighteen years after Bond, Reese's Pieces did something similar. Steven Spielberg wanted M&M's for E.T. Mars turned him down. Hershey said yes.

What followed is one of marketing's most retold stories: Reese's Pieces sales climbed sharply after the film's release. Depending on who you ask the jump was 65%, 85%, or something close to tripling. But what's not in dispute is that a candy brand became a plot device an entire generation associates with a specific, tender scene in a specific, tender film. That's a different order of placement to a diamond on a red carpet. The brand wasn't decorating the story anymore. It was part of it.

The movie becomes the product

 

The logical endpoint of this trajectory is a film that doesn't contain a product at all, because the film is the product.

The Lego Movie, Barbie, the Transformers franchise, F1 the Movie, Space Jam, Disney's theme-park adaptations (Jungle Cruise, The Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean) all run on the same underlying logic: take something people already buy, already ride, or already watch on Sundays, and wrap two hours of cinema around it.

Yes, some of these examples are genuinely good films. But that's not the point. The point is that the commercial relationship has flipped. In the De Beers era, marketing served the film. In today’s era, the film often exists to serve the marketing, and audiences have broadly made peace with that, buying tickets to watch extended, well-produced ads for toys, cars and theme park rides.

Barbie is the clearest case study. Mattel didn't licence its doll to a studio and step back; it co-produced the film, and the design team reportedly worked from the actual dimensions and colourways of the physical toy line. The Lego Movie had followed a similar playbook a few years before, turning decades of "build anything" marketing into a two-hour tone poem about creativity that also happened to sell a ton of plastic bricks.

None of this makes the films cynical. Barbie got more genuine cultural credit than most studio comedies achieve. But it does mean the commercial brief came first and the story was built to fit inside it, which is the direct opposite of how films used to be made.

That's the world we’re in now and it begs a fair question: once the whole film can be the ad, what's actually left to erode?

Plenty, it seems.

A step too far

 

In December 2025, a team of students built an AI tool at an AI hackathon. They called it Halftime and it could digitally insert branded products into existing footage after the fact, no reshoot required. A glance an actor gave to an empty spot on a table could be recontextualised into a knowing look at a can of Coke - or a brand of vape, a bottle of booze, a pack of toilet rolls - dropped in after the film had already been shot, edited, and in some cases, released years before.

The demo racked up millions of views within days, and the professional backlash was fierce: actors raised questions about consent over their own recorded expressions, writers and directors pointed  out that a character's emotional beat can be quietly rewritten by whatever brand deal gets signed after the fact.

Keep in mind that this isn't a future scenario. It’s already happened. A programme built by three students in a weekend has become a live conversation inside the film business rather than a thought experiment.

Unfortunately, the creative complaints may not be enough to stop this event mushrooming into something I'm sure very few of us want - because Halftime has landed in an industry that was already moving fast towards this moment. Global product placement spending grew to roughly $33 billion in 2024, its fourth consecutive year of double-digit growth, driven partly by the same computer vision and AI rendering tools that make something like Halftime even possible.

The ultimate product manipulation 

What makes this new development different from every previous stage of product placement is the removal of a constraint that used to matter: time. Aston Martin had to be written into Goldfinger's script and shot on location. A Halftime-type tool can seamlessly drop a product that launched this year into a show from 2020, aimed at one version of the audience today and a different version tomorrow, without touching a single frame of the original performance.

When that happens, placement stops being a production decision made once by the director. It becomes a distribution decision made repeatedly, forever, by whoever holds the rights.

Will movies just become immersive test rides?

 

Probably, and I think that's an honest answer. The technology to insert anything into anything, after the fact, aimed at whoever is watching, now exists and it works. I can't see this being ignored. There's just too much cash at stake for marketers not to use this tool.

It's down to us

Audiences have shown, repeatedly, that they can tell the difference between a story that happens to contain a brand and a brand wearing a story as a costume, and they tend to punish the second kind very hard. The Reese's Pieces moment worked because it felt like it belonged in the scene. Despite gaining millions of views, the Halftime demo was a failure. It made people angry rather than persuaded, because it was clearly a promo and nothing else.

Ultimately, the outcome of this new and ugly marketing trend won’t be determined by the technology. It’ll be decided by us, the people buying tickets and subscriptions.

The tools now exist to turn any film or TV show into a lengthy ad we've paid good money to watch. Whether that actually happens will depend on whether enough of us keep noticing and voting with our feet when it does.

Final word

Where do you draw the line between smart product placement and a film that feels like a two hour commercial? Please let me know.

---

Follow Chris Godfrey for regular insights and opinion on the business of content & marketing. Subscribe to CONTENTED now

---

Get started with Freelance Words

Strong communication is the bedrock of good business and when there’s a lack of it, problems can arise. Take the ambiguity and doubt out of what your business needs to say. Contact us now.

Contact