Читать книгу Chocolate Busters: The Easy Way to Kick It! - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 19

Although advertising and sponsorships are clear winners, they pale into complete insignificance when compared to good product placement. If you can get a picture of a Milky Way or Flake in a blockbuster film like James Bond, you’ve done well, but get Bond to eat it on screen and WHAM – you have a winner! With that in mind, please spare a thought for Mars who turned down Steven Spielberg’s offer for M&Ms to be ET’s favourite sweet in one of the biggest grossing films of all time. Perhaps they didn’t think the film would ever catch the public imagination – dough! Instead, the contract went to Mars’ rival, Hershey and their sweet named Reese’s Pieces. Although not a chocolate product, there are few who believe Reese’s Pieces were not designed to go head to head with Mars’ bestselling product, M&Ms – they even look similar. Jack Dowed was Hershey’s marketing man at the time and there is just no way that he or anyone at Hershey could have envisaged just what a coup getting the ET gig was. Nothing like that had ever been done before and although the thought seems crazy now, at the time it was a massive $ lm risk. Bear in mind that Dowed made the deal without seeing a script or an image of the alien, and with the knowledge that although Spielberg had been successful with films such as Duel and Jaws, his previous film 1941 starring John Belushi completely bombed. However, according to Dowed himself it turned out, ‘The biggest marketing coup in history’. With such emotional triggers proclaiming that Reese’s Pieces were ‘ET’s favourite sweet’ being plastered everywhere, and with cinemas all over the country putting the product in prime buying spots in their display cabinets, sales shot through the roof. Distributors reported as much as a tenfold increase during the 14-day film launch.