The Winter Soldier – product placements galore

There are a number of product endorsements in this summer’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

In the opening sequence when Steve Rogers meets Sam Wilson, Chris Evans is wearing a prominently branded Under Armour Vent shirt. UA has really put together a strong marketing campaign for their Under Armour Alter Ego collection, targeting young adults who are a big superhero fans. Later in the film, Evans is wearing UA’s new Electric Blue Speedform Apollo running shoes (USD 99.99 only!).

Sam Wilson himself is more of a Nike man, with actor Anthony Mackie featuring the logo prominently on his T-shirt in one scene.

Then of course, there are a few scenes with Scarlett Johansson wearing a Tiffany Hearts® Arrow pendant. This is apparently a nod to her close relationship with Hawkeye from The Avengers. However, I haven’t really seen any promotional work done by Tiffany & Co. around this piece of product placement.

In terms of vehicles, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) drives a beautiful black Chevy C7 Corvette Stingray and there are a bunch of other Chevy vehicles (including the Tahoe SUV) in the movie’s chase sequences. In fact, Chevrolet got the movie’s directors to make this really cute TV commercial for the Chevy Traverse SUV which is a spoof on the movie trailer. Chevy also got the stars to arrive in their cars for the movie’s world premiere in mid-March.

Cap himself, being a down-to-earth regular guy and all, drives a Harley-Davidson Street 750 and the company has done a fair bit of PR around that in the US over the past few months, even running a contest with a custom Captain America themed Street 750 up for grabs.

I also noticed a HTC One being used in the film by Nick Fury; this is apparently the latest model of the HTC One – the M8 – which has just been launched last week and HTC is running a concurrent ad campaign in the US with the copy “only the best for the first Avenger”.

Steve Rogers and Black Widow also visit an Apple Store at one point and there’s a bit of fun with Rogers having to distract an overly helpful store employee while Black Widow tries to get hold of some information online.

Some of these are obvious placements with the brand putting in additional investments over and above to amplify the movie tie-up. Under Armour, Harley-Davidson, Chevrolet and HTC are the best examples of these. In the case of Tiffany & Co. and Nike, I couldn’t find any online activity related to the placements, so if they paid money for it, then I would say it was a dud investment.

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