In the current digital age, people are bombarded with media messages as a part of their daily routine. The majority of these media messages are advertisements that pop up in some of the least expected places: restaurant menus, car windshields, Facebook pages, and even ATM screens. Basically if there is an empty surface, advertisers will try to fill the gap.

These days, everything has become a space for advertisements, which infiltrate our lives by sneaking into our homes, dominating our magazines, decorating our roads and commanding the silver screen. Today, more than ever, product placement in movies is an advertiser’s outlet of choice in order to influence the consumer presumably in their favor.

In the last year, some of the biggest movies have been littered with product placement. When Sex and the City: The Movie came out in late May 2008, viewers and critics alike were anxious to see whether the movie would follow the show’s tendency to drop names and highlight certain brands.

For example, Vanity Fair Daily explains that during the show’s six-season run, shoe designer Manolo Blahnik became a household name because of Carrie’s love affair with his designs. “Manolos” as they so lovingly called them, became somewhat of an extended character in the show. It came as no surprise when the movie was released and the viewer seemed to be watching two separate things: a narrative along with an ongoing commercial for different products. A list of all the products mentioned in the movie can be seen on the Vanity Fair Daily website.

The plethora of beautiful products featured in the Sex and the City movie are visually pleasing, but one has to wonder whether they are effective and what they contribute to the movie. Do movie production companies care more about advertisement sales than content in their movies? It is hard to tell.

For Sex and the City, it is as though you are flipping through a fashion magazine coupled with an enjoyable storyline. The show and the movie have both been successful in the way that they have created a brand that includes all of the luxury goods that are advertised in each setting.

Authors Ashutosk K. Kashyap and IBS Hyderabad state in their paper “Product Placement in Movies and TV serials” that in order to be successful with product placement it is important to consider a wide range of variables. They explain that “context, match of product with type of movie, audience profile, emotional appeal, program involvement, and liking for a star.” Based on the success of Sex and the City: The Movie, we can conclude that they effectively juggled these variables.

Amelia Carr, a junior at Stanford University and a loyal Sex and the City viewer, found the product placement effective.  “I felt like I was walking through a department store as I was watching the movie. It was pleasing, and I found it added to the plot instead of detracting from it,” said Carr.

Fellow Stanford junior, Brian Argyres, who is a first time Sex and the City viewer said, “It was easier to focus on the movie because I was oblivious to the products being presented so I hardly noticed them.”

Nonetheless, if these elements are not combined in a harmonious manner the act of advertising through product placement can essentially detract from the movie, distract the viewer and miss the mark in advertising a certain product.

This distraction materializes with the overwhelming amount of products that are being plugged while the viewer is trying to simultaneously follow the plot, characters, and narrative of the film. Meanwhile, the trend of taking advertising to the big screen does not seem to be losing speed.

For the moment, viewers are tolerating and perhaps even enjoying the effects of product placement for the aesthetic value that Carr noticed in Sex and the City. However, it is only a matter of time until the advertising companies will need to find yet another space to publicize their products in order to give the movie back to the viewer and to keep the consumer guessing at the same time.