Coca-Cola and the Movies [infographic]

As summer movie season kicks off, chances are, you’ll see product placements for Coca-Cola hidden within at least a few blockbusters.

That’s because the world’s most recognized beverage brand has its tentacles in lots of movies. Over the last 80 years, the Coca-Cola logo and Coca-Cola products have appeared in films such as It’s a Wonderful Life, Jaws, Batman, Independence Day and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

Moreover, Coke products have frequently become plot points of the film itself, as with The Gods Must Be Crazy and One, Two, Three.

Our friends at AnyClip put together this infographic that showcases just how many films have used Coca-Cola as product placement over the years. As with last year’s epic infographic about Apple product-placement in film, this infographic was created using AnyClip’s excellent tagging technology. AnyClip tagged on-screen products and extracted film metadata to discern how much time a Coca-Cola product spent on screen.

Interestingly, AnyClip was able to find a direct correlation between the size of a film’s budget and the frequency of a Coca-Cola product placement. As movie budgets have increased, so too have product placements for Coke products.

Even though I’m from Atlanta (the land of Coke), I was still surprised to see just how many films have featured Coca-Cola product placements. According to AnyClip’s Brand Influence in Movie Index (which calculates the number of movies, the number of appearances, the duration and the success of the movies), Coca-Cola has the most influence of any company in the history of the movies.

Hey, can you really imagine E.T. drinking a beverage that wasn’t Coca-Cola? Me neither.

Ah, the blessing/curse of product placement. It’s hard to believe that there once was a time when we weren’t constantly bombarded by advertisements. In fact, by average we see almost 3000 advertisements a day from various media sources (newspaper, internet, tv, etc.). But the hallmark of movie product placement is a magical thing. Being so invested in the characters and the story, sometimes we can entirely miss a blatant shout out to one of your most favorite commercial items from your local supermarket.

I know what your thinking… BRAINWASHING! Well yes and no, but when you break it down that’s pretty much what the goal of advertisement is – planting a brand name in your head so that when you are in need of an item that the commercial or product placement displays, you immediately know where to go because it is familiar. But enough about that, lets talk about COCA-COLA!

This infographic shows that Coca-cola has been present in blockbuster movies for quite a long time. In fact, as the budgets for movies have grown, so have the frequency of it’s presence in Hollywood. Going all the way back to King Kong, Coca-cola has been king of the product placement game, beating out Apple and Toyota in influence over the movie industry.

Gee all this typing is making me thirsty, I think I’ll go drink some Pepsi.[Via]

Let us know what you think of Coke’s cinematic product placement strategy in the comments.