Gaga over product placement

Here’s a modern day “telephone game”: See if you can count how many product placements are in the "Telephone" Lady Gaga video. Now, count the ones that are paid for. Pass it on.



According to AdAge,

"The most-talked about aspect of Lady Gaga's Beyonce co-starring, Jonas Akerlund-directed music video for "Telephone," which premiered Thursday night, was not the singer's flagrant partial nudity, girl-on-girl kissing or mass-murder sequence in a diner featuring Tyrese Gibson.

It was the product placement.

At least nine different brands make appearances in the nine-minute music video, from Gaga's own Heartbeats headphones to a "Beats Limited Edition" laptop, from HP Envy to "telephone" partner Virgin Mobile, and from Miracle Whip and Wonder Bread to Diet Coke."

But how many of these product placements were actually paid for? Not many, according to Gaga's manager. They were simply her ideas.

Put in pop-culture historical perspective, it's interesting to see how much creative license (or not) Gaga takes in her videos. They're definitely edgy but not necessarily original. Like my previous blog post on YA plagiarism, it appears to me as if Gaga is simply taking creative references from a variety of different sources and pulling them all together in a new way. Maybe I'm aging myself here, but all I see is a younger, next generation version of Madonna.

So who is the true material girl?