I would pay good money many quatloos for the Radiation-Free Reindeer Steaks from the ads in ‘Hardware’.
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More recently, Neal Stephenson’s Reamde was seemingly loaded with product placement for camelbak water containers.
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While this is amazing and I have never heard of it before, it is quite disappointing that the ad is a literal break from the novel. I would have found it even more amazing if it was hamfistedly woven into the narrative.
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Reminds me a little of the ads between the tracks on Sigue Sigue Sputniks’ Flaunt It album, which vanished from future versions. Some of them were better than the songs (I say this as a Sputnik fan).
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That’s just to hide there isn’t enough of anything else in it. Salt is cheap.
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Yea, at least those “and now for something completely different” Maggi ads where clearly an advertisement and you knew why you suddenly thought about having an instant soup…
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“The sky above the port was the colour of oxtail soup, tureened to a dead consistency…”
Also:
Dead Kennedys, Soup is Good Food (live, with bonus rant/crowd control from Jello!)
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The series openly displays its sponsor’s product placement in numerous scenes in which characters are shown consuming Nissin Cup Noodles
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Terry Pratchett ditched the publisher as a result of this:
There were a number of reasons for switching to Goldmann, but a deeply personal one for me was the way Heyne (in Sourcery, I think, although it may have been in other books) inserted a soup advert in the text … a few black lines and then something like ‘Around about now our heroes must be pretty hungry and what better than a nourishing bowl’… etc, etc. My editor was pretty sick about it, but the company wouldn’t promise not to do it again, so that made it very easy to leave them. They did it to Iain Banks, too, and apparently at a con he tore out the offending page and ate it. Without croutons.
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It’s rather a fun idea, but under the EU laws of moral ownership I suppose it would be impossible now.
I wonder if there are any SF/Fantasy books translated into different languages with adverts in them which no-one realised aren’t part of the original text. It could happen with TV shows too.
Maybe it’s all around us and no-one knows!
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I’m thinking product placement and trying to keep artistic integrity has been an issue for awhile.
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In Italy the publisher Modadori print science fiction book in a collection since the '50s. Urania. You could stiill subscribe to it: https://www.abbonamenti.it/rivista/urania and get the book mailed at home.
Being classified as magazine they decided to add some advertising in the last pages normally for other incoming books and comics they published. http://www.fantascienza.net/uraniandco/pubb1952ot2.html
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Please tell me Heyne had the German-language rights to the Gor series…
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I wonder if Dibbler’s complete misunderstanding of subliminal advertising was inspired by Maggi? (Also the House of Ribs product placement.)
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I always wondered why that change happened. Now I know.
I was happily buying Pratchett Novels and had a shelf full of colorful but neat book covers and suddenly there was a change and the new Goldmann Pratchett books had a different format looking all weird, being larger than the Heyne editions.
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I think that’s in the original ad: the publisher inserted whole pages, mostly blacked-out, rather than dropped individual lines into the main text. The Pterry example in the comments seems to show the same format.
The double irony, now probably forgotten, is that when it came out it was largely reindeer that were irradiated.
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Alexei Sayle FTW.
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