HuffPost called it "when product placement goes wrong." Bloomberg called it "a curious cameo." Slashgear said it "makes us giggle." Another declared it Spider-Man fans' biggest gripe.

But more than anything, Bing's product placement in the new #1 movie at the box office, The Amazing Spider-Man, is turning out to be an amazing missed opportunity for Microsoft to defend itself and its search engine.Continue reading...

As tentpole movies increasingly become vehicles to move items off store shelves, one "product" that has excelled at leveraging onscreen placements is "geography." And when it comes to comic book titles and their real life cities, probably no hero is better at local marketing than Spider-Man.

No surprise then that, with a brandtastic new Spider-Man reboot hitting cinemas today, Sony and Marvel marketers leveraged Peter "Spider-Man" Parker's real life New York City home as part of its amazing marketing campaign, with one mild-mannered exception.Continue reading...

A re-imagined Spider-Man will open shortly — July 3rd, to be precise — and it has a lot of expectations to live up to… product placement expectations that is.

In the three Spider-Man films of the last decade, brandchannel spotted 98 identifiable brands or products. When it comes to heroic product placement, will the new The Amazing Spider-Man live up to the old? It appears off to a good start.Continue reading...

Sony Mobile’s first 4G LTE smartphone, the Xperia ion (now available exclusively in the U.S. from AT&T), is tying into Sony's movie release of The Amazing Spider-Man on July 3rd in Sony’s first-ever national TV spot for the new device. (The Experia was promoted in a campaign directed by Wes Anderson that kicked off in Europe.)

The new :60 U.S. spot, titled “One Block,” takes viewers on an entertaining, imaginative journey following an Xperia ion-engrossed user walking to his apartment, as the experiences on his phone come to life around him. It's also a bit of a game for brand-spotters, as it comes with a pitch: "To show what it's like when everything's in HD, we hid different movies, TV shows, songs, bands and games from the Sony universe on a city street. See if you can guess all of them."Continue reading...