Movie advertising starts time traveling

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

As we fast forward through commercials and turn on adblock (please don’t, that’s how we survive here), advertisers have to come up with new and creative ways of selling their products to the masses. One old faithful? Billboards. Can’t avoid looking at those! But also product placement in movies and TV.

What you see above is How I Met Your Mother doing a little plug for the upcoming ZOOKEEPER where Kevin James finds forbidden love in a zoo. Or something like that, I wasn’t really paying attention during the trailer. But what’s the catch? The episode is a rerun, and originally aired in 2007.

This isn’t a new trend, as digital product insertion has been happening for a few years now, but it’s starting to get a bit more noticeable as ads are placed into older shows like this one. In this case, it appears that the ZOOKEEPER photoshop is subbing in for a book cover? That thing is too big to be a DVD case. I guess the novelization must be just as much fun as the movie. Which is not fun at all. Kidding, I’m sure it will be a classic…

Have you noticed more of this type of advertising lately? And no, I don’t mean in TRANSFORMERS 3 where an entire robot’s crotch was dedicated to Target.