The most arresting segment of Morgan Spurlock’s third film, a documentary explaining product placement funded entirely by product placement and advertising, doesn’t have a single ad. It focuses on the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and their 2007 Clean City Law that outlawed outdoor advertisements, leading to the removal of almost 3,000 billboards and other signs and a cleansing of the city skyline. The visual is striking for the two opposite reactions observed in the theater: the cleanliness and simplicity of the skyline is incredibly refreshing and breathtaking, but more than one audience member made an audible comment on how ugly the city looked without the color and style provided by in-your-face marketing campaigns, highlighting the significance of advertising in creating the physical space we recognize as a city.
POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (POM bought the above-the-title sponsorship rights for a cool $1 million) will be required introductory viewing for any student in any discipline looking to go into marketing within six months to a year maximum. A film student who tried his hand in standup and a documentarian less abrasive than Michael Moore but more of a showman than Errol Morris, Spurlock is far more interested in what makes American culture tick, asking questions instead of creating a lecture. He ends up with a very funny, insightful, and poignant film that merits a massive audience. It is a masterful deconstruction of how more and more facets of our cultural and scientific knowledge have seeped into how companies can find more information about potential customers and influence them to spend money on their products.
The premise in itself is simplistic genius: Spurlock sets out to produce a film about the process of product placement, while concurrently attempting to fund the production budget entirely through product placement. From a marketing standpoint for the companies, this creates a huge conundrum: embrace the increased level of transparency and risk ridicule by sponsoring a movie critiquing the very act of corporate sponsorship, or be secure enough in the idea that the association with Spurlock will come off as savvy and hip.
That central arc of gaining sponsorship is pretty easy to map out and predict. Spurlock makes cold calls to big companies who want nothing to do with him, working his way down to companies like POM Wonderful, fast food/gas station chain Sheetz and deodorant company BAN, but eventually bigger and more widely-known companies like Hyatt and JetBlue buy into his process. He talks to filmmakers, marketing professionals, lawyers, consumers, public school administrators, academics, psychologists, biological scientists and many others in order to create a well-rounded primer on the ethics of the over-saturation of advertising in our lives that goes unnoticed. College professors researching advertising provide the greatest academic insight, but it is the directors Peter Berg, Brett Ratner, J.J. Abrams and Quentin Tarantino who pull back the curtain the best to provide stark factual information on the strain that advertising places on the relationship between art and business in Hollywood and around the world.
The greatest achievement of the film, and what makes it even better than Spurlock’s breakout debut Super Size Me, is that it’s a massive and widely-focused conversation starter. It fundamentally alters the way in which viewers will critique and engage entertainment from now on. Attempting to take the same approach as Hollywood narrative filmmakers in making a summer blockbuster an event and applying it to a documentary to form a “docbuster,” Spurlock creates not a fully transparent deconstruction of the system, but one that succeeds by trying with all its might to expose its process and come out with morals somewhat unscathed.
Final Grade: A-