FedexAway

FedexAway

For this blog I decided to analyze product placement of FedEx in Cast Away. As for you guys who never saw this movie. It tells the story of a FedEx employee, who after surviving a plane crash finds himself in an isolated island, where he has to fight for his survival, Tom Hanks is the one who interprets this character and we have Robert Zemeckis as the Director of the movie.

           Since Chuck (Tom Hank) is a FedEx employee we can already see the implementation of the brand itself. As the movie goes we can see FedEx products in nearly every scene. Which clearly led in reinforcing FedEx name recognition as Martin says in Advertising; Name-brand props in the movie; Consumer group wants labels to signify product placement; "Miller says the impact of product placement goes far beyond revenue and advances several theories."  .  I think that the FedEx placement on this movie was more beneficial to FedEx itself, however, it made the film more realist as well on instead of using a non-existent company.

Nevertheless, I thought the movie did a good job in adding credibility (Ethos) to FedEx, even though it involved a plane crash I don’t think this was noticed to a bad thing. Also, the delivers made at the begging also tried to reinforce the sense of FedEx being a fast and reliable since it pretty much seems to be happen in the same day. In addition, we can see that the Chuck is kind of paranoid with time and everything being on time, part of his personality might also give the audience the sensation that FedEx workers are like that. Moreover, I shouldn’t forget to mention that the fact of even having the FedEx CEO being featured in the movie is also a big ethos appeal.

Regarding the pathos appeal, we can see that later on FedEx releases a commercial and emphasizing that no matter what happens, they will always deliver your package. It was pretty funny, but I think they were mainly trying to tie the people feelings about the movie and their packages that are about to be shipped. As Martin says in Advertising; Name-brand props in the movie; Consumer group wants labels to signify product placement; "brand-name products and logos realistically reflect the landscape of everyday American life." 

To conclude, I could see that the movie itself does a very good job in product placement, also, it was easily noticeable how it added ethos, pathos, and logos for the brand. However, I think it was a little bit too much, since you pretty much can see the FedEx logo or reference in almost every scene of the movie. Therefore, I’ll give two directors cut for this one.