Goodbye Rosebud: Job of Manatt Phelps Counsel Is Product Placement
Lawyer Jordan Yospe lives by the motto “the early bird gets the worm”—only in his business, the worm may well be associated with a certain brand of Tequila or maybe a company that makes fishing lures.
Yospe is “a brand integration” expert and counsel at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, according to the firm’s website and a profile of Yospe’s work in the New York Times. Yospe meets with writers and producers before a movie is cast or a script is finished to help cut product placement deals, beating the movie studios to the punch, the story says.
“For the moviegoer, the shift will mean that advertising will become more integral to the movie,” the Times says. “The change may not be obvious at first, but the devil is going to wear a lot more Prada.”
The Washington Post’s op-ed columnist Harold Meyerson noted the story. “Jordan Yospe has a job you couldn’t make up,” he writes.
Yospe was formerly general counsel at Mark Burnett Productions, where he helped bring product placements to shows like Survivor and The Apprentice, the Times says.
The fees for product placements in a film can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars for a product that is an intricate part of the story line. Another option, the story says, is a barter arrangement that might have a hotel company provide cast and crew accommodations. A third requires companies to help market a movie in exchange for placement.
Yospe’s fee is a percentage of the money earned in integration deals.
Columnist Meyerson has doubts about the deals. He imagines how Yospe might have reacted if he had met with Orson Welles before Citizen Kane was made. Yospe might have noted the reference to “Rosebud” and might have suggested “just one little switch. Instead of ‘Rosebud,’ how about ‘Flexible Flyer’?”
