Product Placement in Chinese Cinema: From Resistance to Acceptance (1999–2009)

Introduction

To what extent does the development of cinematic product placement go hand in hand with the commercialization of a particular film industry? Given the situation in the American film industry, the connections decide how advertising agencies engage in the practice, what insertion forms these businessmen generally adopt, and what attitudes filmmakers hold towards this engagement. Reforms in diverse sectors in the industry —such as investment structure, production patterns, distribution system and technologies, media forms (e.g., the rise of television), and advertising (e.g., the emergence of professional agencies)—fashioned the particular use of onscreen advertisement in the eras from the silent cinema to the present (Segrave 2004).

A similar but distinct situation is certain to happen in China. Compared with Hollywood, the Chinese film industry achieved considerable commercial progress in a relatively short time from the early 1990s to the 2000s. During the period, the industry experienced anti-entertainment tendency (at the turn of the 1990s), market-oriented reform (since 1993), and state-led commercialization (since 1996). Behind this commercialization can be seen the confrontation, negotiation, and fusion of socialism and capitalism with the deepening of China's economic reform. We will discuss this process in more detail in later sections. What we want to point out here is the result of this process: the Chinese industry continued commercialization but simultaneously retained many filmmaking modes and preferences born under the original socialist planned economic framework. We conclude that the filmmaking awareness within in the industry lagged behind the new production modes in the context of commercialization.

This article aims to investigate the connection between the localization of product placement and the film industry's commercialization, and how the connection caused this cinematic advertising practice to develop its own cultural peculiarities in such context. It also reveals the causes of the formation of these peculiarities, from the perspective of the country's ideological shifts (which is manifested as the twists and turns of the industry's commercial reforms). This article focuses on the one-decade period from 1999 to 2009, during which the attitude of Chinese filmdom towards product placement corresponds to the progress of the industry's commercialization. That is, Chinese film professionals, directors in particular, first resisted, then tried, and eventually accepted product placement.

This commercialization inevitably has left an imprint on the use of product placement in contemporary Chinese film production, carrying the interaction of the two ideologies. Regarding the interaction, Zhao and Belk (2008) offer an inspiring discussion in their study of how Chinese advertising appropriating a dominant anti-consumerist political ideology to promote consumption within the country's social and political transition. They argue that the advertising “draws upon the symbolism of political propaganda to build imagery of Chinese as consumer society” and therefore “justify consumption” (p. 241). Consequently, it shifts public opinion on consumerism, affects specific marketplace activities, and legitimized the Chinese Communist Party's control in the new millennium.

It is remarkable, however, that Zhao and Belk's discussion does not address the resistance coming from inside the advertising industry to the commercialization in the interaction in the transition period. This internal resistance was evident in the Chinese film industry. It was mainly from the directors cultivated under the system of the nationally controlled procurement and distribution of film works. These directors therefore valued artistic integrity in relation to the impact of business interests. Some of them like Zhang Yimou received great success worldwide, which in turn fueled this filmmaking preference.

This resistance did not stop the tendency to use product placement in the film industry. It is because this use was in line with the dominant ideology of economic reform. In addition, this advertising practice per se is a sign of the ideology, since it was first and frequently used in the Chinese New Year films, a film category that originally spawned implementing state-led commercialization in the late 1990s (Zhang 2008a).

The New Year films with product placement are more like the “iconic brands” Douglas Holt (2004) describes in his cultural branding theory. According to Holt (p.11), an iconic brand carries identity value of cultural icons that are “exemplary symbols that people accept as a shorthand to represent important ideas.” It performs identity myths that address collective anxieties and desires of a nation that emerged when model ideologies and everyday life acts diverge at a particular point time. Following his ideas, the New Year films with product placement can be regarded as an iconic brand of the state-led commercialization in film business in China. By virtue of the popularity of New Year films, an appearance had been created that the film industry had joined the unstoppable trend of commercialization. The regular use of product placement was one manifestation of the trend. Consequently, both filmmakers and audiences gradually accepted product placement. It has been a normal operation in the industry since the 2010s.

Therefore, we argue that the peculiarities formed in this period of localization were the result of the negotiation between capitalism and socialism. The result in general was the state-led market-oriented reform, or borrowing the Party's description at its 14^th National Congress in 1992, it was the “socialist market economy.” The following economic development served to consolidate the communist party's legitimacy (Wu 2019; Zhao 2014). That is to say, capitalism is only used as a tool to maintain the country's original ideology; without the cooperation of the already existed apparatus, this reform and development cannot be realized. Regarding product placement, the popularity of this commercial approach inevitably depends on the director-centered filmmaking pattern and the resulting aesthetic emphasis on artistic integrity that were developed in the context of socialist planned economy.

We conduct this investigation and explain the arguments from three aspects, namely: (1) changes in film intellectuals’ awareness of product placement, (2) the correspondence between filmmaking modes and insertion forms, and (3) the role of filmmakers (mainly directors) in advertising practices. This investigation offers a new perspective to understand the localization of product placement by addressing the correspondence between the advertising practice's development and China's macro political and cultural environments of the given period. It brings film industry policy analysis and film textual analysis into advertising studies. The resulting interdisciplinary exploration contributes to enriching the advertising studies regionally and culturally.

Methodology

We use a compound method comprising of archival analysis, industry policy analysis, and textual analysis to conduct the investigation. Archival analysis and industry policy analysis are mainly used in revealing awareness changes and delineating the role of filmmakers. Textual analysis and industry policy analysis are used to address the correspondence between the industry's commercial progress and insertion forms. The object of textual analysis is Feng Xiaogang's New Year cinema, including Sorry Baby (Mei wan mei liao, 1999), Sigh (Yi sheng tan xi, 2000), Big Shot's Funeral (Da wan, 2001), Cell Phone (Shou ji, 2003), A World Without Thieves (Tian xia wu zei, 2004), and If You Are The One (Fei cheng wu rao, 2008).

There are two reasons for this object selection. Feng began New Year filmmaking in response to the establishing of the state-led framework of commercialization in the film industry (which will be discussed below). His film production of the period discussed in this article had been consistent with the industry's development. In addition, his production had continued to involve product placement since Sorry Baby in 1999. Because of this application, Feng's films always attracted criticism. For example, some audiences dubbed Cell Phone a “promotion show of Motorola” (Yu 2011) after being bombarded with continual introductions and presentations of phone models and functions over the film's two hours. Some critics even called that Feng was the CEO of product placement business in the film industry (Liu 2013). One may therefore bring the development of cinematic product placement into focus through Feng's concurrent experiences.

Choosing 1999, the year Sorry Baby was released, as the starting point is based on consideration of the investigation's coherence. In 1999, private capital re-engaged in film production after the government permitted the film industry's market-oriented reform in 1996. This re-engagement transpired in a legal grey zone since no regulations or policies had confirmed this participation (Meyer-Clement 2016). However, private media companies such as the Huayi Brothers advertising company de facto stepped into the filmmaking business. The company was involved in Sorry Baby as a joint producer and a month after the release replaced the government-sponsored Forbidden City Company as the main investor in Feng's next film, Sigh (Qiu 2011). This kind of participation of private media companies initiated changes in the investment structure previously dominated by state capital. The changes provided conditions to enable the rise of product placement. The engagement of Huayi Brothers is believed to have directly inaugurated the era of bringing product placement into China's filmmaking practices.

Since 2009, the film industry has widely accepted product placement. For example, many media companies specializing in the advertising practice emerged in the early 2010s. State-owned film conglomerates like China Film Group also got involved while the film authorities began to consider legislation to regularize the business. More details will be offered in the case studies. Therefore, we regard the year 2009 as the ending point of this investigation.

Another question that needs to be addressed is to determine whether a particular product display is an advertisement. Archival analysis offers help in the identification to some extent. However, most of the materials that can be collected are about the product placement in Feng's early films made with Huayi Brothers, such as the insertion of Bank of China in Sorry Baby. Given this limitation, we also identify product placement according to the sponsor list emerging at the closing credits of films.

We do so because we regard that product placement is “a paid product message” (Balasubramanian 1994) and outsiders hardly learn sponsorship allocation in detail. The appearance of products serves promotional purpose and it is made highly visible by the virtue of, for example, “the size and /or position on the screen or its centrality to action in the scene” (Gupta and Lord 1998, p.49). Nevertheless, certain visible scenes of brand products may be only for creating an aura of authenticity or arranged randomly by props masters (Lehu 2007). It is quite subjective to confirm whether a brand product appears at the center of frame. In a word, we basically identify product placement through judging whether an insertion is of commercial purpose.

Regarding the application forms, product placement has been roughly classified into four forms according to its role in film texts, namely auditory or verbal mention, signage or visual mention, contextual insertion, and story-point product placement. Some classifications are meticulous. For example, the type of auditory or verbal mention is further defined with two subtypes: those “alluding to audience through specific sound or melody” and those “appearing as dialogue” (Song 2010, p. 132). Some others are systematic. Cristel Antonia Russell (2002), for instance, divided the entity into visual type (e.g., brands appearing on screen), auditory type (products mentioned in dialogues), and plot connection (lower plot placements that contribute little to stories and the higher ones that take a major place in stories or building the persona of characters).

However, these classifications do not address the connection between insertion forms and the development of film industries. It is understandable in the circumstance of Hollywood, as the updates in using product placement were almost synchronized with the development of the industry (Segrave 2004). There was no need (or perhaps it was impossible) to consider the connection. Regarding the Chinese film industry, it has had the Hollywood model for reference so that it should have introduced the insertion forms according to the dynamic connection. But the industry in fact did not do so, from which one may perceive the combined influence of aesthetic pursuits and rampantly rapid commercialization on the advertising practice. Also given the influence, we conclude the insertion forms based on Russell's classification as two types: background implanted and narrative participating. The former type contributes little to the development of stories. The latter type, as its name suggests, intertwines with the narrative by, for example, inscribing the theme of the stories and engaging in characterization. We will discuss the specific advertising practices in Feng's films with the two types.

The Chinese Film Industry's Commercialization

Before discussing the connection between the localization of product placement and the commercialization of the Chinese film industry, we first review the industry's development in order to address why both the promotion of and resistance to product placement coexisted within Chinese filmdom. In this part, we do not solely focus on the period from 1999 to 2009, but go back to the period from the late 1980s to 1999, a time of profound ideological change. This decade featured a paradoxical phenomenon in which an excessive obsession with artistic integrity suffused the industry while commercial reform continued. This situation offered conditions for the localized use of product placement in the industry.

The first cause of the industry's commercial reform in the late 1980s was market demand. One direct manifestation is the rise of entertainment films (yule pian) around 1987. For example, in that year, the editors of China's primary academic journal of film studies, Dangdai dianying (Contemporary Cinema), interviewed film professionals to learn their attitudes towards entertainment filmmaking. They discussed the definition of this film category, its aesthetic merit, and its potential contributions to the larger film industry. The journal further organized a conference around this topic in 1988 to confirm the significance of entertainment films to the industry's market-oriented transformation (Zhang 1989).

However, this change did not last long. In 1987, the Party launched anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign, which defined “the political implication of market reforms and the need to oppose both bourgeois liberalization and peaceful evolution” (Brady 2008, p. 47). Two months later, the film authorities put forward an idea, namely zhuxuanlü (which literally means “main melody”) in response to the campaign. This idea quickly became the tenet of the Party's propaganda (Yuan 2007). At this stage, it had no specific connotation but had definite political orientation, that is, safeguarding the socialist system.

In the following debate on filmmaking orientation, entertainment film was marginalized while the film authorities spared no effort in main melody film production. As its name suggests, main melody film refers to films made for promoting the “main melody” idea, aka the main melody spirits. At this delicate moment a significant appointment took place that further confirmed the situation of entertainment filmmaking: the undersecretary of the Ministry of Radio, Film, and Television, Haosu Chen, was removed. During his tenure, Chen (1989) proposed yule pian zhuti lun (that entertainment films form the base of the Chinese film industry) and was regarded as the leading figure who fully supported the production of this film category.

This series of changes in effect supported the planned film production system, because state-owned studios treated main melody films as the primary mission regardless of cost and investment return. This production practice reinforced the director-unit system that had been established in 1956 at the first National Film Studio Director Meeting in Beijing Shefan Temple (aka the Shefan Temple Conference). The conference happened at the same time that the government completed the socialist transformation of ownership of the means of production (1953–1956). Unsurprisingly, it featured decommercialization by allowing director-centered film studios to act on their own to choose scripts and crew. According to Rui Hao (2019), the debate as to the “Necessity of the Art Character of Film” also emerged during the period. Its impact on China's filmmaking was so influential that the idea remained the governing doctrine in the 1980s. At that time, the idea of regarding films as commodities was met with denial, repulsion, and even contempt (Rao 2021).

The marginalization of entertainment film production left some breathing room to the art-house filmmaking that also embraced director-centered pattern at the turn of the 1990s. Then, art-house films were mainly made by a group of filmmakers now known as the Fifth-Generation directors, such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and others. Graduated from Beijing Film Academy of the early 1980s, they were trained under the popularity of the director-unit system. When they came to the fore, state-owned studios still retained a director-centered pattern. These directors were allowed therefore to conduct their aesthetic explorations and experiments without worries over market response.

The ensuing international success of their works amplified this filmmaking preference. In the early 1990s, these directors “enjoyed adequate financial support from foreign investors and access to overseas markets” (Zhang 2008a, p.72). This situation meant that their filmmaking became a model of the day when domestic private capital was allowed to engage in film production in a more restricted way (Zhang). The development of art-house filmmaking shaped how the public understood films, with the result that aesthetic merit became the sole criterion for judging cultural works. Accordingly, the director-centered cultural tradition gradually developed into a worship of directors. Obviously, product placement cannot develop in this environment, but the ascendancy of directors foreshadowed the contradictions that occurred in the advertising practice and the role of filmmakers therein.

The turning point came in 1993 when the government implemented a market-oriented reform within the film industry. The country's situation was stable after the political crisis triggered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Tian’an Square event. The Party introduced the idea of socialist market economy at its 14^th National Congress in 1992 and so refueled the China's economic reforms. Accordingly, the connotation of the main melody spirits became specific, moving from anti-bourgeois liberalization to what President Jiang Zemin summarized in 1994, namely “patriotism, socialism, and collectivism” (Jiang 1994). For the film industry, a more realistic reason for carrying out the reform was that main melody film production drained the government's already limited sponsorship (Zhang). Art-house films of the Fifth-Generation directors did not perform well at the domestic box office.

Accompanying this ideological shift, the film authorities began to adjust film production to market demands with the promulgation of Suggestions on the Deepening of the Film Industry's Institutional Reform. Entertainment filmmaking was placed back on the industry's development agenda. Simultaneously, the market-oriented reform facilitated the loosening of filmmakers’ lifelong labor relation with state-owned studios, which resulted in a resource integration of film professionals and private funds. With that came outsourcing cooperation with the studios. Dismissed or freelance filmmakers together with private media companies brought the production quota from their previous work units to make films. It was the time when Feng began his career as a film director. However, these changes did not lead to the cinematic use of product placement. This reform only remained three years and then was quickly rectified, since the film authorities perceived a risk that socialism would be eroded in both the entertainment films and the experimental films of the Fifth-Generation directors (Rao 2021).

The 1996 National Cinema Conference held at Changsha served to correct the outsourcing pattern politically. A market-oriented production scheme for political promotion, aka the “9550” Project, was launched at the conference. The project aimed to support 50 commercially viable films, characterized by prominent main melody spirits, during the Ninth Five-Year Plan from 1996 to 2000. Accompanying the implementation of the project was the connotation extension of main melody spirits from the aforementioned three core values to the rhetoric of “spirits of the time” (shidai jingshen). The new connotation contains everything that would be helpful to consolidate the Party's legitimacy, such as neo-Confucian ideas, morals and ethics, and virtues (Ho 2015).

Therefore, the films made under the project should prioritize ideological rectitude: enlightening, educating, and amusing people and achieving a unification of social and economic benefits along with a unification of socialist orientation, artistry, and enjoyment (Ding 1998). Accordingly, the subject of main melody films expanded from revolution history to ordinary people's daily experience. The films were allowed to present the “true contradiction in life” but this contradiction should be solved in the end (Calkins 1998, p.307).

The 1996 Conference and the following 9550 Project signaled the government's intention of establishing a state-led mode of commercialization. The filmmaking under the project easily gained investment and other financial and administrative support from the film authorities and state-sponsored film companies such as the Forbidden City Film Company. Private capital was excluded at this time, since their funded films were often banned. Feng's film company, for instance, went bankrupt after two of his films were banned. As Feng (2003) recalled, no one then dared to invest in his projects. This plight led him to initiate making New Year film under the 9550 Project. The industry continued to be commercialized but simultaneously the planned production model was preserved as well with the engagement of the government. This situation again suggests that the use of product placement in the industry requires receptive film directors as subsequent development proved.

Product placement started appearing in domestic films when the state-led framework of commercialization was eventually built in the late 1990s. The film authorities basically finished the 9550 Project and many state-own film conglomerates emerged at the time. They almost monopolized the whole industry by tethering film production, distribution, and exhibition sectors. Until then, private capital was again accepted as the element that could contribute to the industry's state-led development and the promotion of main melody spirits. This recognition had continued so that private capital participated in making The Founding of a Republic (Jian guo da ye, 2009), an all-star cast film marks the 60^th anniversary of the People's Republic of China.

The film authorities de jure approved the participation in 2000 following the directive Opinions on the Further Reform of Chinese Cinema (No.320). Product placement gained rapid development but as mentioned before, the backlash against the advertising practice had been relentless until the mid-2000s. In 2003, the film authorities officially replaced “film cause” with the term “film industry” to refer to the Chinese cinema, as a response to the cultural industries policy proposed at the 16^th National Congress of the Party. After that, the market-oriented awareness gradually became a consensus within the industry. It follows that more and more filmmakers accepted product placement. At the turn of the 2010s, staunch opponents and the indifferent like the director Pang Ho-cheung and Jia Zhangke began to insert paid product messages in their works (Liu 2011).

Localized Awareness of Product Placement

Based on the preceding historical review, it is easy to find that the government is the enabler of the film industry's market-oriented reform. The industry's state-led commercialization and the traditional emphasis on artistic integrity jointly construct and inform the understanding of product placement among filmmakers: they should treat product placement as a vital way to cover capital shortage in film production. Accordingly, the filmmakers are more concerned about harmonization between film content and insertion information, than the effect of product placement. This conventional thinking is naturally incorporated into the research and practice of other film intellectuals such as film scholars. It provides them with a local dimension when appropriating the relevant definitions and theories pervading the Hollywood industry. The outcome in turn guides the further use of product placement in film business.

The conventional thinking manifested itself first in how film intellectuals introduced and defined the idea of product placement. Taking Wei Li's (2015) summary of Hollywood definitions as an example, it consists of three dimensions – industrial, textual, and audience perspectives. This systemic framework is helpful for revealing differences in the treatment of product placement between the American and Chinese film industries. But this division is partial and obviously overlooks the main anchor of various ideas of product placement in Hollywood: whether something is commercially viable. In America, this consensus had been evident as early as the 1910s when advertisements and films began to combine. Voices against the practice, relating to ad shorts in particular, raised questions as to whether films could uphold “the right of receiving 100-percent pure entertainment” (Segrave 2004, p.210) and maintain their appeal to achieve sustainable cooperation with the advertising industry. Clearly, motivating this objection was the uncertain impact on the original texts’ potential box-office performance.

As with Wei Li's (2015), many Chinese scholars framed the discussion of advertising practice totally under the textual relationship between films and placements. This treatment fails to consider this relationship's complexity, which is manifested, say, in the tension between the inserted contents and the films’ story contexts. The product placements as heterogeneous elements are bound to affect cinematic narratives, but the crucial point is that this impact could be disruptive or constructive.

Definitions of product placement in the Hollywood context reflect these two preferences. Kerry Segrave (2004, p.15), for instance, regards product placement as “deliberate insertion into an entertainment film script of a product, its signage, a verbal mention of a product, and so on, for a consideration.” This deliberateness suggests that the insertions are not necessarily compatible with the cinematic contexts of the film scenes. Kaylene Williams, Alfred Petrosky, Edward Hernandez, and Robert Page (2011, p.2) explain the reason for this inconsistency to a certain degree by defining product placement as “the purposeful incorporation of commercial content into noncommercial settings.” Nevertheless, they advise that insertions should be conducted based on particular scenes (Williams, Petrosky, Hernandez, and Page 2011). By comparison, Jean-marc Lehu (2007, p. 23) holds a more positive attitude towards the issue of potential inconsistency, since for each insertion “there is no one placement, but multiple possibilities for stage direction, satisfying different objectives”. Arguably, although Hollywood as an industry considers the influence of product placement on film narrative, this consideration is not for the sake of confining the advertising practice.

This consideration is explicitly reflected in the other two dimensions. From the industry perspective, a consensus in Hollywood is to regard product placement as an integrated marketing strategy that expands connections between industries. Two modes are generally offered in practice: (1) inserting partners’ products, brands and images in films so as to recoup investment and cost in advance (Turner 2006), and (2) using tie-ins to achieve the promotion of both sides of the partnership (Wyatt 2006). In addition to product exhibition, this series of promotions sell what Justin Wyatt calls “a way of living,” which means showing “models of behavior” to audiences (Wyatt, p. 25–26). The idea inculcates the illusion that if audiences buy the advertised products, they will have the same quality of life depicted on the screen. Discussions around this pervasive effect involve a further dimension in the understanding of product placement, namely the perspective of audience reception.

Many relevant studies have emerged and the resulting definitions emphasize the insertion's purpose and effect. For example, Siva Balasubramanian (1994, p.31) argues that product placement aims at “influencing movie (or television) audiences via the planned and unobtrusive entry of a branded product into a movie (or television program).” Other scholars such as Mckechnie and Zhou (2003) directly use this idea in their sampling survey to investigate the attitude of Chinese and American audiences towards the product placements in Hollywood blockbusters. One basic conclusion was that the Chinese audiences were less accepting of product placement insertions compared with their American counterparts. McKechnie and Zhou published their research results in 2003, a time period during which the use of product placement began to rise alongside Feng's New Year filmmaking. This less-accepting attitude reflected the general reaction in China to the rise of product placement, and to some extent reveals why Feng's films of the day received so many criticisms (which will be discussed below).

Definitions in the Chinese industrial context present a complete different emphasis. Chinese researchers deliberately continued to give little attention to audience reception save for a few studies using quantitative methods. Film scholars had begun to give due consideration to the advertising's commercial function but still saw it as a vehicle to recoup investments. They gave priority to exploring how to balance narrative integrity and the implementation of product placement. For example, when discussing the idea after 2005, the Chinese often used the term yinxing guanggao (recessive advertisement) to designate it. Attention was mainly paid on the contradictions between cultural and business values existing in the practice (Liu and Song 2005, p.163). Some critics argued that arbitrary insertions “will distract audiences’ attention from the films and cause their aversion” and therefore “will ruin the images of particular brands and products” (Huang 2005, p.122).

Around 2008, film academics turned their focus to how product placement functioned in the integrated marketing practices between the film industry and others. Zhang (2008b, p.55), for example, described product placement as “a model of interindustry cooperation, in which products or services of particular brands were incorporated in films and therefore smoothly delivered them to consumers following the distribution and promotion of the films”.

Two years later, the research trend shifted again towards exploring how to consider both profitability and aesthetic merit of the insertions. During this period, many articles, comments and professional suggestions emerged within the industry. Some of them began to discuss the relationship between film production and product placement from the perspective of the advertising industry. Ideas and theories from advertising studies were introduced to investigate and direct interactions between film professionals and advertising agencies (Chen 2011). Media consultancies like Endata even released a report on the market development of cinematic product placement in 2014 (Endata 2014). All these new changes suggest that the use of product placement had become specialized, which is to say, the practice had basically been approved within the industry.

Insertion Forms and Filmmaking Patterns

These changes in the awareness of product placement are visually reflected in the evolution of insertion forms. In general, the understanding of product placement results in a paradoxical attitude for filmmakers in practice. The filmmakers clearly recognized the value of this advertising practice as “the era of living by box-office receipts had gone” but simultaneously, many of them were of “instinctively obsessive pursuit of aesthetic merit and, only when their projects encounter a shortage of investment [would] they give attention to product placement” (Cui and Song 2004, p. 91). They worry to what extent product placement could contribute to the commercialization of domestic film production and to what extent it might affect the artistic integrity of the resulting works.

This paradoxical attitude was also reflected in Feng's advertising practice in New Year filmmaking. The difference is that Feng's reaction was pragmatic. For example, in an interview promoting A World Without Thieves in 2004, he clearly expressed opposition to inserting advertisements in films but at the same time vigorously advocated its function of reducing the risk of investment losses (Beijing Entertainment Newspaper 2004). Given the timing of his remarks, Feng's response was worth pondering. This point in time (the mid-2000) corresponded to that when product placement was active in the industry. As mentioned before, it was also the time that widespread debates over product placement arose within the film industry. For instance, critics attacked A World Without Thieves for its overuse of product placement. At least 12 brands were involved ranging from BMW automobiles to Nokia to China Mobile Company (Huashang Chenbao 2010).

The apparent changes in filmmaker attitudes towards product placement often coincided with significant advances in the industry's market-oriented reforms. With attention to Feng's New Year filmmaking, the next section analyzes the correspondence between increasingly commercialized production modes and insertion forms. We mainly focus on the use of background implanted and narrative participating, the two local types of product placement discussed in the methodology.

Background Implants and Private Sponsorship 1999–2000

Initially, advertising products appeared in China's films as a part of their settings. They emerged as signage in scenes or were mentioned in conversations or voice-overs or film scores. These insertions had little impact on narrative and this echoes the situation of private capital reengaging in domestic film production in the late 1990s. The 9550 Project, together with the emerging strict film regulation, propelled film professionals towards collaboration with the government. It temporarily restrained the engagement of private capital by offering state filmmaking grants and targeted censorship of film products. This situation made private capital flinch. Feng then turned to making government-sponsored New Year films like Party A Party B under the 9550 Project. This series of filmmaking to some extent put the government's reform prescriptions into practice, serving the promotion of main melody spirits.

As mentioned earlier, the project's goal was basically attained in 1999. The whole film industry entered in a quasi-monopolistic situation in which the government was able to flexibly decide how to reopen the business to private capital. For many private investors, their uncertain position in tandem with their unfamiliarity with the business shaped their conviction to produce films sustainably. Therefore, the private companies generally regarded films as a media platform that could support their own business, such as providing an advertising service or promoting their images and products.

A case in point was the Huayi Brothers Advertising Company. Also in 1999, the company dabbled in the filmmaking business following the commercial success of its television series Psychological Clinic (Xinli zhensuo). It subsequently invested in many successive film projects. Feng's Sorry Baby, the project in which this company was most directly involved, promoted the Bank of China. The bank then was the major client of the Huayi Brothers for its main key business of advertising (Anon 2014).

The bank's image and featured services were embedded in the film as a part of the background. For example, a long medium shot was used to entirely present the bank's logo and an image of its featured product, the “Great Wall Card” (Changchen ka, Figure 1), in a scene in which an unpaid salary is demanded. A crane shot is used in the next scene of a waiting tourist group at a train station, in which the shot draws attention to a promotional slogan about the card on a waiting coach, namely “rong changcheng zhi zun, xian fangcun zhi yi” (which literally means “the card can show its clients’ prestige and offer them convenient service”). In addition, there are several shots that highlight the vehicle graphics on the side of the coach, depicting new buildings from the real estate group Oulu Classic.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The insertion of the Bank of China in Sorry Baby, 1999.

In this way, private capital both inside and outside the industry mutually combined and flooded the filmmaking sector. The insertion form was then being used frequently in Feng's films following the industry's progress of state-led commercialization. In 2000, the No.320 directive stipulated that domestic private and foreign investments were permitted to engage in the production of single film projects. Two months after this promulgation, Huayi Brothers and the Taihe Corporation jointly founded the Huayi Brothers and Taihe Film and Television Film Investment Company. The new company financed Feng's film Sigh as executive producer (Qiu 2011).

Similar to Sorry Baby, the film mentions the real estate Oulu Classic many times in conversations between characters. In a house-decorating scene, one may easily grasp the location of the company's new buildings from the character's lines, “turn left after you pass the Anhui Bridge.” The scene was set in a model house in the buildings and the real estate company in fact was subordinate to the Taihe Corporation. This business was Taihe's featured project in the Beijing area around 2000 and was the major business of the film's investor and producer.

One may therefore argue that the use of product placement at this stage was a practice of resource exchange between film production partners. Product placement was given to investors as a bonus. The investors did not purchase placement for their images or products as advertising clients. They definitely had few requirements on the insertion forms and the resulting promotional effects. In other words, the film's original narrative structure basically remained intact.

This situation naturally enabled the scene implant to become a normal treatment. Similarly, this pattern of filmmaking collaboration led the volume of the insertions to mainly depend on how many clients and business partners worked with Huayi Brothers (and Taihe). Both the investors and producers had yet to appreciate product placement's commercial viability. Implanting products in films was more of an occasional event.

This point is further proven by the subsequent situation in which Huayi Brothers gradually grasped the operating mechanisms of the film business and industry. The combination of narrative and product placement was visibly apparent following this opening up of the industry. The aforementioned Oulu Classic, for instance, appeared in Sorry Baby only in a couple of shots that captured fleeting moments. By comparison, Sigh deliberately mentioned it many times and scenes directly exhibited its houses. This enhancement corresponded to, or to some extent resulted from, the official approval of non-state capital in the filmmaking sector. An inference is that a clear identification of product placement was increasingly required when advertisers and other interested parties deeply engaged in film production as investors or (and) producers. Such requirements could develop to a point where they inevitably challenged narrative integrity, as happened in Big Shot's Funeral, Cell Phone and his other New Year films.

Narrative Participation and Film Coproduction 2001–2003

As a Sino-US coproduction, Big Shot's Funeral illustrated how changes in investment structure fashioned forms of product placement. It describes the story of a Chinese filmmaker, Yoyo, directing a funeral for his Hollywood colleague, Don Tyler. The fictional Hollywood director has a heart attack during his remaking of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) in China. He asks Yoyo to give him a Chinese “comedy funeral” but leaves no money to initiate the project. Yoyo has to raise funds by making the funeral a live show. He auctions off advertising spaces and seeks tie-in sponsorships. The film ends with a sequence of explanation, which suggests that it is in fact Tyler's new Sino-American coproduction, on which he works with Yoyo to bring this experience to the big screen.

Product placement saturates the funeral planning and the latter per se constitutes the narrative. This planning, as Feng claimed, resembles the filmmaking process (Braester 2005). One may further argue that the film shows how a coproduction is made, that is, it is a film within a film or mise-en-abyme. Given such a structure, the film demonstrates how one should conduct advertising practice in the context of a new division of labor in transnational collaborations. The solutions mentioned were all put into practice in Feng's later films (discussed below). In this sense, the film became a visualized rehearsal of product placement.

A primary cause of the situation is the film's complex investment structure and the various, ensuing and high demands for return. The making of Big Shot's Funeral involved nearly all the newly emerging filmmaking forces of the day including the state-owned China Film Group Corporation (CFG), the private company Huayi Taihe and its foreign partner Columbia Pictures Asia. The film was released several days after China became a full member of the WTO. Feng's proactive response to the new policy suggests that his New Year filmmaking was still in line with the ideology of main melody spirits. It continued to serve the state-led commercialization, although the 9550 Project had been completed. This political consistency further fashioned the use of product placement in the industry.

The combination of these investments naturally raised the cost of the film and increased expectations as to returns. Facing this pressure, the function of product placement was no longer merely for building industry connections or serving Huayi Brothers’ clients. It became a means of hedging against investment risks. The fact that the insertions in Big Shot's Funeral outnumbered those found in the two aforementioned films is an indication of this. It featured an increase in the variety of advertising products including, for example, SunRuan Beauty Cream and Outback Steakhouse.

Accordingly, sponsors proactively had specific but diverse requirements as to the visibility of their products, brand images and other elements in films. The background implant approach was then no longer applicable in such cases. The modified filmmaking pattern inevitably compelled advertising professionals to update their approaches. In addition, the two sides of the coproduction had different attitudes towards the use of product placement: Hollywood film companies put a positive spin on the practice in general while their Chinese partners were more meticulous. This tension eventually produced a compromise, an eclectic approach, which employs background implants to address narrative insertions.

This compromise may be attributed to the film's mise-en-byme to a large extent. In the funeral planning sequences in particular, the self-reflexive structure allowed for a mixture of actual and fabricated brand products and company images to appear on screen. Both served as product placement for the funeral show. In Figure 2, the auction scene for the advertisement positions the Outback Steakhouse Company as one of the winners and a medium long shot shows its brand name and logo explicitly. In the funeral rehearsal scene, one may easily notice another actual company, SunRun, when the characters are passing by a group of young attractive and athletic women. The company is (at least in the early 2000s) known for its body slimming cream and in the film, the young ladies deliberately repeat the product's slogan: “it feels good to be a woman with a curved figure (zuo ge nüren ting hao).” The two companies were also the film's sponsors. Their names were listed alongside others such as BMW Beijing Representative Office (a Huayi Brothers's partner) in the “Special Thanks” section at the end of the film's closing credits. In other words, they participate in the narrative as a part of the funeral advertising, although they serve more as background plates or props in the fictional show.

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Figure 2.

The insertions of SunRuan beauty cream and outback steakhouse in Big Shot's Funeral, 2001.

In this way, the producers’ expectations of investment return was reconciled with the film professionals’ concerns for narrative integrity. The emphasis on this balance was also manifested in characters discussing specific principles of product placement. The primary law is to achieve a situation whereby commercial insertions are compatible with the diegetic contexts. For example, the characters introduced a particular brand of furniture into the funeral planning, because a bed is needed in any case to support the fictional Hollywood director's remains. The function of product placement was reiterated in a discussion where it is described as an emergency solution to the sudden break of the capital chain for the funeral show. The depiction of the funeral planners as Feng's screen alter ego visualized a stealthily changing attitude towards adverting practice within the industry in reality.

Therefore, Big Shot's Funeral can be compared to an instruction manual for implementing product placement, especially given that there were at that time no other filmmakers following the tendency. Interestingly, the film also satirizes the advertising practice by displaying how the solemn funeral becomes a carnival of advertisements. For example, Yoyo's advertising uses a dummy. Every space of the dummy is arranged to carry commercial placements (Figure 3). He dresses the dummy with the shorts of one brand and the tank top of another; puts a trainer on its left foot and a leather shoe on the right. The dummy is even designed to wear a pair of sunglasses but one lens is removed, leaving a spot for a brand of contact lenses.

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Figure 3.

Yoyo's operation of product placement on the dummy in Big Shot's Funeral, 2001.

This series of product placements made the film become “an example of exactly what it is mocking” (Kong 2003, p. 186), but simultaneously the “critique is undermined by its own complicity in the object of critique” (McGrath 2008, p.191). This self-contradictory gesture showed that the filmmakers affirmed the practice's business function but instinctively hesitated about its overuse in the film. The real agenda of this mockery was to ensure a limit to film insertions. It is still the projection of residually bigoted thoughts of artistic integrity. This prudence is fully manifested in Cell Phone from choosing advertising sponsors to integrating insertions into the narrative.

Cell Phone was another Huayi Brothers’ coproduction with Columbia Pictures. It explored another pattern of film coproduction by using foreign funding to produce films based on local stories. Advertisements in the film are completely integrated in the narrative as enabling elements for the story's development. The story is about a show host's extramarital affair. As the name suggests, most of the film's plot is developed around communications via mobile phone. The main advertising sponsors were China Mobile Company and Motorola Phone Company (Keane 2006). Their products become indispensable elements of the narrative, constantly echoing the film's topic of moral decline highlighted by technologies.

Taking the insertion of China Mobile as an example (Figure 4), the company's image and advertising slogans appear exactly at the point when the host deceives his mistress. The host starts a relationship with another woman after his divorce and this breaks the mistress's heart. When she is watching the host's show, themed around sincerity, the advertising slogan of China Mobile, “communicating starts from the heart” (goutong cong xin kaishi), is inserted as a spot announcement especially when the insincere host is talking about the importance of being honest. The slogan is originally used to introduce the company's service attitude towards customers. In the film's context, it serves to stress the lack of sincere relationships between the characters. This spot announcement is not at variance with other scenes. It keeps reminding the audiences of both the host's show and the film itself of the sharp contrast between his assertion and conduct.

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Figure 4.

The insertions of China Mobile company and motorola phone company in cell phone, 2003.

Similar treatment happens with the insertion of Motorola phones. In the film, characters use different models of Motorola, the host and his 388C and his mistress and her E365. The two models appear on screen in sequence and the latter is more advanced than the 388C in terms of functions. Many close-ups are used to visually display their feature functions, which then initiate the story's turning points. The 388C model features a touch screen that makes checking and editing text messages easy. Because of this function, the host's wife glances at his flirtatious message, which directly leads to the exposure of his extramarital affair. The E365 model is the mistress's new phone and has a sleek design that enables its users to record sound and video. This function is introduced during the host's secret dates with her. The mistress uses it to record their intimate moments and sends the video to the host as a threat (Figure 4). She therefore receives his recommendation so as to take his position at the television station.

Obviously, a closer combination of product placement and narrative is achieved in Cell Phone. The product placement is appropriated by the storytelling and to some extent decides how the film's sections connect with each other. Arguably, under the same investment structure, Cell Phone is more proactive compared with Big Shot's Funeral in implementing product placement. The functional shift of product placement was accelerated from a cost-reducing means to a way for enterprises outside the industry to take part in the domestic filmmaking business. This new mode of cooperation quickly became popular after 2003 following the industry's further reforms and the resulting changes in filmmaking patterns.

Various Insertions and Outside Influence 2004–2009

In the mid-2000s, the industry hastened its opening up to non-state capital following the launch of new policies and directives. The film authorities introduced Provisional Rules for Business Admittance in Film Production, Distribution and Exhibition Sectors (No.20) in 2003, which enabled non-state-owned enterprises to establish film companies all by themselves and stipulated that foreign capital could join them by way of equity investment or as production cooperators. In 2004, two more regulations were enacted, namely Regulations on the Administration of Sino-foreign Film Coproduction and Provisional Rules for the Qualifications of Film Enterprises. They were consistent with the government's particular prescriptions for Mainland-Hong Kong coproduction that had been listed in the CEPA (Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement) in the same year.

All three regulations guaranteed and encouraged the participation of Hong Kong investment and relocated this kind of film coproduction as mainland films. These films were not subject to film import quotas. This situation stimulated collaboration between the two regions, which certainly increased the complexity of the investment structure. In the same year, Feng and Huayi Brothers started its collaboration with the Hong Kong-based company Media Asia Group. This simultaneous response again reflects that although Feng's filmmaking no longer relied on state capital, he and his partners celebrated the government's prescriptions for the industry's commercialization as well as aligned to the political philosophy (main melody spirits) behind. This new soil cultivated a fashion for blockbuster production, a pattern that made prudence regarding advertising insertions impossible.

Accordingly, a large number of product placements emerged in their high-budget A World Without Thieves, If You Are The One, and its 2010 sequel of the same name. The earnings from product placement basically could cover the cost of the films. The advertising revenue of the sequel of If You Are The One was about 60 million RMB (8.34 million USD), which exceeded its filmmaking cost by 50 million RMB (7.38 million USD) (Chen 2011). Product placement now was weighed in an increasing competitive industry. It developed into a profit-generating rather than merely cost-recovering function.

Embracing product placement appeared to be inevitable following the example of Feng's treatment in the two films. Even Feng's attitude towards insertion approaches had changed since he gave less attention to how to balance insertion scenes with others. A new tendency was to use background implants and narrative participation approaches in combination. For filmmakers in this industry context, the point of concern was not whether product placement is feasible. It became how many advertisements can be inserted in a particular film and how to achieve such a practice so as to simultaneously satisfy both film producers and advertising sponsors.

The advertising sponsors were able to project their influence on the filmmaking by proactively working with filmmakers, rather than the other way around. For example, the Nokia Phone Company offered to finance A World Without Thieves immediately after it saw the promotional effect of the product placement for its rival, Motorola, in Cell Phone (Zhongguo Guanggao 2006). Accordingly, there are many close-ups of the Nokia phone image and logo in the film. Compared to the medium close-ups of Motorola in Cell Phone, the operation in this film is blatant. The close-ups of Nokia appear in adjacent sequences in which the characters “inadvertently” display the image of phone models. The images first appear as stolen goods in a temple prayer scene where the phones replace the characters as the protagonist.

Moreover, the insertion of Nokia phones engages with the narrative, which is more evident in the scene where a couple of pickpockets discuss how to comfort and protect the rural migrant worker from being robbed by another gang of thieves. A set of close-ups shows the content of their text messages (Figure 5). The camera pans the phones, shifting the focus from the China Mobile logo to the message content, the Nokia logo, the pickpockets’ facial expressions and then back to the Nokia logo. The insertions bridge rather than break the narrative regardless of whether they arouse attention. The Nokia phones’ stable performance and China Mobile's good signal in the plateau guarantee the messages are communicated. They lead the story to its first turning point: the couple explains their motivation and decides to escort the rural migrant worker.

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Figure 5.

The insertions of Nokia in A world without thieves, 2004.

In this case, it becomes difficult to distinguish background-implanted advertisements from narrative-participating ones. Nokia phone product placement appears intensively at the connections between the film's different sections. This combination produces a mutually penetrated promotional effect. For example, some audiences associated Nokia phones with thieves after watching the film and believed that the phones were easily stolen (Xin Kuaibao 2005). This may be regarded as providing a counterexample but does reflect the promotion's effectiveness. Arguably, film at this stage no longer had been a platform for exhibiting products and services. It became a part of the exhibition per se.

Advertising sponsors played an increasing influential role in Feng's subsequent filmmaking. Product placement in his If You Are The One not only engaged with the narrative but also shaped it to display products. This tendency produced more than the expected level of cinematic excesses that were heterogeneous with the narrative but also an inevitable phenomenon happening along with the storytelling. They offered many extra details to audiences. According to Kristin Thompson (1977, p. 57), audiences “must [realize] a narrative function does not exhaust the material presence of that detail” and it is “the wealth of excessive details which make the film a rich perceptual field”.

In If You Are The One, the cinematic excesses are deliberate, as the scenes containing product placement appear to give little attention to whether their motives are consistent with the storytelling. The film has many irrelevant plots, such as a scene in which the male protagonist buys a house at Qiandao Lake in Hangzhou and a scene in which he and the female protagonist are traveling in Hokkaido, Japan. In fact, these scenes could have been set anywhere, not just Hangzhou and Hokkaido. That they were is a direct result of the changes in the film's investment structure. Hangzhou and other local cities in Hokkaido such as Kushiro City, Teshikaga Town, Shari Town and Abashin-City were all listed in the “Sponsor” and “Special Thanks” sections.

It was tourism promotion that led the scenes to be set in these two otherwise dispensable areas. As a result, many excesses like the scene of the male protagonist confessing in a church (Figure 6) emerged and ultimately propelled the storytelling towards accommodating itself to the product placement. Advertising sponsors will naturally embrace this kind of excess if it brings room for exhibiting their products. For filmmaking, it meant that product placement did not simply influence narrative but began to engage in its construction.

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Figure 6.

The advertisement of Hokkaido in if you are the one, 2008.

Based on such change, one may argue that product placement no longer faced much resistance during its popularization. Feng's New Year films were not the only case. As mentioned above, other filmmakers began to try this approach in the late 2000s. It is difficult to count how many films involved product placement and how many advertisements were inserted in these films, but a few of phenomena may indicate the new situation. In 2010, the China Film Group and the Beijing Shengying Media Company jointly launched “Analysis System of Product Placement in Films and Television.” The software was used to “analyze scripts automatically and screen out suitable places for insertions” (Chen 2011, p.114). In the next year, problems like overusing product placement caught the attention of State Administration of Radio, Film and Television and led the institution to promise that it would introduce specific regulations to manage their operation. This industrialization and preparatory legislation suggest that product placement had been accepted within the industry. Given the tension between insertion forms and filmmaking modes, a question then arises: what role do filmmakers, especially directors, play in the process of insertions?

Filmmakers as Advertising Conspirators and Practitioners

As shown in If You Are the One, advertising sponsors had been capable of exerting an influence on film narrative. This situation appears to be described by Mark Crispin Miller's (1990, p.198) idea: product placement interrupts storytelling by “the transfer of creative authority out of the hands of filmmaking professionals and into the purely quantitative universe of the CEOs.” This idea is modeled on the American film industry. The fact is that Hollywood filmmakers are not passive when it comes to advertising practice in the way that Miller describes. Obviously, the status of filmmakers in film production also has consequences for the implementation of product placement in both of the film industries. In the following paragraphs, attention will first be given to the role of Hollywood filmmakers so as to make comparisons and to help demarcate the local features of product placement in China's case.

For Hollywood filmmaking, the intervention of advertising sponsors is necessary but does not develop to the extent that creative authority is transferred to CEO groups. Many film Corporations and filmmakers choose to seek cooperation with advertising sponsors. Product placement becomes a means to balance production budgets or is used as a constituent part of settings so as to enhance verisimilitude. In most Hollywood filmmakers’ eyes, insertions could not render a film strange, simply because brands form part of our everyday lives and because they have, in fact, become necessary to the realism of certain scenes (Lehu 2007).

In the early 1980s, film companies like Paramount Pictures proactively sought advertising cooperation with companies and manufacturers according to the film scripts and projects at hand. Their basic operation was to “review final scripts to see what products were needed and then the studio would negotiate fees for manufacturers to obtain name-brand access to the screen” (Segrave 2004, p.171). In certain cases, the charge was free as filmmakers or producers received the products supplied instead. twentieth Century-Fox and MGM/UA went further. They “[cut] out the middlemen and [dealt] with manufacturers” and therefore saved on commission; some studios even issued “price lists outlining how much it cost for a verbal mention, or hands-on use by a star, and so forth” (Segrave, p.166, 170, 212).

Hollywood filmmakers generally are not averse to revising scripts for commercial insertions. The Little Mermaid from 1989, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, had a sad ending at the initial stage of script writing but eventually offered a happy ending to the viewing public. A key reason for the change was the tie-in of a fast-food chain and “[happy] endings were always thought to be more conclusive to consumption and purchasing” (Segrave, p.185–189). Some filmmakers voluntarily involved products or brands in their projects, such as Chanel boutique in Anastasia from 1997 directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. They did not pay companies or manufacturers for the operation but needed to acquire authorization. Arguably, product placement in Hollywood does not lead to a transfer of creative authority. Filmmakers are the orchestrators of the advertising practice.

This cooperation is built on the premise that filmmakers and producers share business interests with advertising sponsors. Filmmakers and property men initiated the advertising practice in Hollywood. This business then extended outside the industry. The property men generally engaged in haphazard cooperation with companies or manufacturers in order to save props fees at the very beginning (Harmetz 1983). In return, the suppliers were given the chance to display their products or images on screen. Some of the property men founded advertising agencies by the early 1980s, such as Don Nunley's Unique Product Placement believed to be the first product placement company in Hollywood. This agency contributed to many classic films that to some extent influenced how the business developed in the industry. Examples include Coors beer in E.T. from 1982, directed by Steven Spielberg, and Ray-Ban sunglasses in Top Gun from 1986, directed by Tony Scott (Stein 2021).

Many film companies were following the same path and, in the new century, relocated their attention to the synergies of product placement. Many commercial insertions have a close connection with the film companies themselves. For example, the items advertised were the products of these companies or their subsidiaries (Lehu 2007, p.54–57). This connection indicates the common attitude towards product placement within the industry, that is, film professionals basically regard it as a necessary and normal operation in filmmaking. In fact, the voices against the practice mainly came from outside the industry and targeted the crude techniques that were used in the insertions (Segrave 2004).

Regarding the Chinese film industry, the development of product placement in China unfolds in an opposite way, given the correspondence between insertion forms and filmmaking patterns discussed above. The business did not naturally grow out of the industry. It engaged in filmmaking following non-state capital and private companies entering the film production sector. This mode of participation suggests that, at least in the period this article focuses on, implementing product insertions needed not only conditions permitted by the industry's reform but also cooperation with insiders, especially filmmakers who were willing to do so.

The core agenda of the reform was to increase the commercialization of film production on which filmmakers had an irreplaceable influence due to the aforementioned long-lasting adulation of the director-centered production within filmdom. It would be difficult to use product placement in films if directors rejected cooperation. This helps to make sense of why there are few other films with easily identifiable product placements in addition to Feng's films in the same period. Therefore, differing from their Hollywood counterparts, Chinese film professionals have enabled product placement. They take part in this advertising practice and more importantly, they coordinate the tension between the requirements of advertising sponsorship and film production.

The weight placed on artistic merit in film production as a long-standing mindset had naturally cultivated resistance to product placement inside the industry. Only the new external forces along with the reform could break the chain and cause changes of opinion. It is not surprising that Huayi Brothers led the change and its films, with the exception of Feng's works, rarely addressed the issue. The scarcity of cooperation with filmmakers, together with the commercial imperative, reinforced the group's dominance in the advertising practice. For example, Feng once said in an interview with the channel CCTV 2 in 2005 that he did not know what a film would look like if the budget were over 80 million RMB (11.94 million USD), “just imagine how many advertisements I would have to find a place for” (Zhang 2008a, p.143). His statement not only displays the advertising sponsors’ influence but also reveals that the director is the actual controller of product placement. It is the director that enacts the advertising sponsorship in film production.

One may find a further explanation for the aforementioned Feng's contradictory behavior in the early 2000s: he articulated objections to product placement but simultaneously increased its use in his films. By doing so, his product placement was implemented under the cover of celebrating dissenting voices. Given this dominance, it may be argued that product placement also did not transfer creative authority from filmmakers to advertising sponsors in China's case. Only a transformation happened in the process: the filmmakers, especially the famous, turned their cultural capital into commercial benefit.

At the beginning of the 2000s, Chinese directors’ coordinating role in the interaction between capital and culture was highlighted. Their cultural capital, such as prestige, creative authority and their works’ popularity, was an advantage in establishing connections with market forces. Filmmaking in China became a market-oriented cultural practice where filmmakers worked as what Yomi Braester (2005) terms “cultural brokers.” They negotiated requirements from different investors and sponsorships in cultural production so as to reach the goals of making their films profitable, advertising products, and promoting their own images as cultural big shots. As for product placement, filmmakers’ ability to negotiate derives from their domination in filmmaking and their works’ box-office performance. It is also a type of cultural capital that can be converted into commercial benefit. Taking Feng's experiences as an example, the increasing number of commercial insertions in his films confirms the business value of filmmakers as negotiators.

It must be admitted that for Chinese filmmakers, being the coordinator is the product of a given context. It was a temporary expedient at a moment when the film industry had to conduct reform imperatives without yet building a robust system for commercial filmmaking similar to the Hollywood system. For this reason, when filmmakers accepted product placement following the industry's deepening commercialization, their coordinating function was undermined. Professional companies emerged and took their place. Accordingly, since the turn of the 2010s, criticisms of cinematic product placement were less visible in the media. In 2013, listed film advertising companies even emerged in the industry such as U-RIGHT MEDIA. China's film advertising practices started to become industrialized.

Conclusion and Findings

The coordinating role of Chinese filmmakers in product placement is a negotiated result of the artistic priorities of traditional filmmaking and the industry's commercial imperatives concerning film production. China's version of product placement develops along with the industry's reforms and ensuing changes in filmmaking patterns. It displays local features in both mode and application. The obsession with artistic integrity, for instance, leads Chinese film intellectuals to appropriate carefully and selectively Hollywood's ideas and modes of commercial insertions. Their awareness of product placement goes hand in hand with the industry's state-led commercialization.

Following Feng's experiences, one may conclude that at the very beginning prudent Chinese filmmakers prioritized artistic integrity and narrative continuity in their films. They always tried to avoid insertions into production that interrupted the narrative. It follows that product placement hardly developed from within the industry. It was pushed by new entrants emerged in the commercialization reform, namely, private media and film companies. Therefore, when facing competitive pressure together with the industry's opening-up after China's entry to the WTO, a more proactive attitude replaced this prudence.

Due to localization, the Chinese film industry and Hollywood share many similarities in both the development stages and insertion modes. However, the similarities carry different meanings. Product placement in general proved to be an effective means to reduce risk on investment return in the two industries. But for Chinese filmmakers, their preference was to treat product placement as extra income in addition to box-office receipts. In certain case profits served the filmmakers’ aesthetic exploration in the market-oriented context.

In fact, filmmakers in both industries have emphasized harmony between the insertion contents and film narrative. In the Chinese film industry this emphasis is based on the filmmakers’ worry about the damaging effects on the narrative from insertions. For their Hollywood counterparts, it indicates how the filmmakers judge and enhance the promotional effects of product placement. These differences again highlight the developmental tendency of product placement in the Chinese film industry and its key local features discussed above. They explain why Chinese film intellectuals did not fully treat product placement as a normal operation that naturally emerged with the industry's commercialization. The differences also answer why this operation became a component of Chinese filmmakers’ cultural capital rather than a method to achieve aesthetic realism. The filmmakers play an important role as an enabler in this advertising practice. They accommodate the media companies and advertising sponsors to the existing production preferences to fulfill their commercial demands.

This article contributes to Chinese scholarship on cinematic product placement. It reveals the commercial motivations for the advertising practice coming from the film industry's market-oriented reform. The discussion of the localization of product placement further indicates the ideological shifts behind the motivations, which eventually lead to both the resistance and acceptance of product placement within the industry. Therefore, this article fills in the research gap that Zhao and Belk (2008) do not address, namely the latent resistance cultivated by socialist planned economic system to China's advertising practice. In addition, it expands the use of Holt (2004) cultural branding theory in both film industry and cinematic product placement, with which it explains the causes of this advertising practice first appearing in New Year filmmaking. This article calls for an expansion of the dimension of advertising research to other disciplines. The experience it demonstrated may enlighten practitioners to consider the state-led framework when introducing other marketing approaches.

Overall, with attention to the contextualized use of product placement, this article reveals the impact of socialist cultural legacy on the implementation of commercialization in motion pictures. In the 2010s, new features and patterns of product placement accompanied this change of attitude. Chinese film advertising companies not only targeted domestic films but also gave attention to foreign blockbusters and film co-productions. The insertion of the Yili Group's Shuhua milk in Transformers: Age of Extinction from 2014 (directed by Michael Bay) is a case in point. Further discussion about the new development and role of Chinese filmmakers therein is worthwhile.