If you've ever seen a James Bond movie，you'll know that the hero gets around in a smart Aston Martin car. Even if you know full well that you could never afford such an expensive vehicle, you don't forget the name, or the car.
Why? You have been affected by product placement.
Companies pay a film to place their products in the movie. Product placement took off in the West in the 1980s and is now catching on in China. Two Hunan Satellite TV dramas are recent examples：Ugly Wudi and Let's Go Watch the Meteor Shower (《一起去看流星雨》).
Shampoo, mobile phones, cars and fitness centers–anything can be product-placed. Advertisers value the mass appeal of the movies, knowing that a successful film can showcase their goods to hundreds of thousands of viewers. But when product placement takes over, artistic considerations can take a back seat.
Cai Zhiyong has been product-placing for years. The Beijing-based advertiser admits there is a conflict between art and business. He explains the way one ad works. In If You are the One (《非诚勿扰》), the actress Shu Qi plays a flight attendant. The movie contains product placement for airline companies.
Cash-strapped filmmakers often have to give less consideration to the quality of their work because they need money from advertisers. In the original story for Meteor Shower, the heroine's mother owned an ice cream shop. But no ice cream company wanted to sponsor (赞助) the film. For this reason, the story was changed. In the film the man drinks 20 cups of milk tea instead of eating ice cream.
So you may see the power of business over the movies, since the script (剧本) was perhaps written so that a product could be placed-whether it was ice cream or milk tea.
小题1:James Bond movies are mentioned in the first paragraph to show_________.
A．how popular James Bond is
B．how great the
Aston Martin car is
C．how to make a movie more artistic
D．how effectively product placement works小题2:Product placement can have a bad effect on the_________ of a movie.
A．atmosphere
B．mass appeal
C．box-office success
D．artistic value小题3:What does the underlined word "cash-strapped" in Paragraph 6 probably mean?
A．Short of money.
B．Wasting a lot of money.
C．having enough money.
D．Trying to save money.小题4:We can learn from the example of Meteor Shower that__________.
A．business has a big say in the movie
B．the original story was not suitable for a movie
C．filmmakers are only concerned about making money
D．milk tea is more popular than ice cream
