Review: "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" is an Hilarious (and Eye-Opening) Look at Product Placement in Movies

You know the old adage that writing is more effective when the writer "shows," not "tells"? Documentarian Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) has come up with a pretty brilliant way to show how "product placement," a new and disturbing form of advertising that is currently sweeping the entertainment industry, is ultimately a very corrupting influence with consequences for us all.

How? By literally getting advertisers to finance his movie on the topic of product placement, which even has a sponsor as part of the title: POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

In other words, this is a humorous documentary about the practice, always done in a secretive, non-disclosed fashion, of getting advertisers to pay to incorporate their messages into a finished entertainment product. You're really watching a commercial, but you don't know you're watching it — which, psychologists say, makes the advertiser's message much more effective and manipulative. 

Here Spurlock literally exposes the practice: going into board rooms to pitch the idea to various companies. He says, "Hey, you wanna sponsor my documentary about all this?" And he promises his sponsors that he'll suck up to them completely, saying exactly what they want him to say about their product.

The end result is one of the most interesting, and brilliantly subversive, documentaries I've ever seen. We see the various executives and ad agencies openly discussing the practice of product placement as well as other newer, more insidious advertising practices.

Spurlock's point about all this? He never actually makes it. He can't make it: he's too busy sucking up to his sponsors.

Instead, his ultimate point must be inferred: whoever has the gold makes the rules. Or more pointedly: dance with the devil, and you're going to get burned.

And in retrospect, it's hard for me to imagine a more daring, effective, or chilling way for him to argue his case. Increasingly, the line between "advertising" and "content" is becoming blurrier and blurrier. We don't even know when, or how, we're being manipulated. And even more dangerously, what ideas are not being exposed to the world at all, are being effectively censored, because no corporate entity is willing to finance their distribution?

(The movie posits the interesting theory that all this comes about as a result of the advent of VCRs: by giving viewers the option to not watch TV advertising, entertainment entities had to give advertisers other ways to get their message out. So they tore down the wall between advertising and content, and now the internet is obliterating that wall ever further. In other words, there really is no such thing as a free lunch, just more surreptitious ways of getting you to pay for it.)

Incidentally, what do the movie's advertisers like Ban Deodorant and Merrell Shoes get out of all of this? Ironically, they come off smelling like roses, because they're taking a stand in favor of disclosure and openness, and maybe a little irreverence too. They also get mentioned in reviews like this one, which is a product placement you can't even buy in a Morgan Spurlock documentary. 

Spurlock is a gay fav from the days of his TV documentary/reality show 30 Days, where he occasionally dealt with gay topics (and he's looking as adorable as ever here). As in Michael Moore's personality-based documentaries, here Spurlock effectively personalizes the complicated topic, like when he tries to discover his own personal "brand" or uses technology to map out his own brain's responses to various advertisements.

It's not a perfect movie. Ironically, most of the interviews with "experts" such as Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader fall flat; it's the hilarious discussions with corporate executives and advertising folk where this movie really sings.

And the movie goes off on some tangents like school advertising and outdoor advertising in Brazil that, while somewhat interesting, aren't incorporated as effectively as they should be into the overall movie. Meanwhile, I wanted to see more actual examples of product placement in movies and on TV — and hey, what about the internet too? What exactly are we talking about here?

Still, Spurlock is trying to bring attention to an important topic, and bring visibility to something that has been, for the most part, invisible. In that respect, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is a complete success.

And he didn't even have to pay me to say that.