“I think I’ve created a brand and a business”*…
Independent Studio Services, or ISS as it’s known in Hollywood, is one of the leading prop houses serving the motion picture and film community. Producers rely on it to fit sets with every manor of physical item, each authentically evocative of the scene being shot. Most of those items– from sideboards to side arms– are “commercially-anonymous”… that’s to say, not overtly branded. But increasingly over the last several years, via product placement, branded goods– the Heineken that James Bond drinks in Skyfall, the Coke cups in front of each American Idol judge– are slipping into the spotlight.
Still, there are lots of situations in which producers need a “branded” item that isn’t real:
“We’re trained to see brands, so when you don’t it’s almost jarring,” says Michael Bertolina of ISS. “But the network won’t use a brand if it interferes with an advertising deal they have or if it’s not used for its intended use. So instead of covering it with tape or running into a legal nightmare, we create these brands that are fictional.”
Given the normalcy of brands, prop houses like ISS base their fake products on them. Bertolina says the prop version gets modified to the point where it won’t impede on anyone’s intellectual property, “just like private label cereal boxes versus something from Kellogg’s.” So Leonard on Community reviews “Let’s” instead of Lay’s, or Ben Harmon drinks “Haberkern” on American Horror Story last season instead of Heineken.
“Our owner’s name is Gregg Bilson, so you’ll find Bilson cigarettes all over TV,” Bertolina adds. “If you watched Justified on FX, [Mags Bennett] ran a shop and had a rack of cigarettes behind her head all the time. They’re all Bilson.”
More on brands-that-aren’t at CoCreate.
* “I don’t think I am an actress. I think I’ve created a brand and a business.” – Pamela Anderson
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As we switch to generics, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet as we know it, became an actual network. Initial test login characters had been sent on October 29 of that year from a ULCA computer to a computer at SRI in Menlo Park, CA, which were then permanently connected on November 21 through early routers (small packet-switching computers then called Interface Message Processors). With the addition of nodes U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah on this date, the “remote binary” configuration became a true network. By December 1971 ARPANET linked 23 host computers to each other; today there are over 900 million host computers connected to the internet– and over 2.4 Billion internet users worldwide.
