A few rumours and good news from “Brothers and Sisters”. The good news is that they are shooting for the fifth season. ABC has renewed the contract for the serial, together with a long list of other shows: America’s Funniest Home Videos – The Bachelor – Dancing with the Stars – Desperate Housewives – Extreme Makeover: Home Edition – Grey’s Anatomy – Lost – Private Practice – Supernanny – Ugly Betty – Wife Swap.

The little rumour is that, between the different changes that characterize each season, there is this time a fashion evolution concerning the dressing and the protography.

The production has looked for fashion accessories to better define the characters. It’s almost sure, by next week there will be the last confirmation, that an Italian shoe Company will be chosen for the female characters. The costume designer has become almost crazy for Apepazza models, a very nice Italian Company well known around America and all over Europe for 30 years. Fulfilled the “artistic selection”, the shoes are now at the fitting moment. In the meantime, as news get spread very quicly through the web, other two productions, 90210 and Cougar Town, seem to be interested in examining the option Apepazza.

For long time a comedy by Disney “When in Rome” has been spoken about; it should be a modern copy of “Vacanze Romane”. The movie title has been borrowed by an aphorism of S.Ambrogio, extremely famous even in the Anglosaxon countries with the translation of “When in Rome, Do as Romans Do”. A suggestion to behave like the people who live in Rome when in Rome. Probably the Production has well accepted the suggestion as the coming out of the movie has been postponed from September to next January. But the most nice curiosity is another one. Almost one year ago, during the shooting of a service dedicated to the movie in New York, the famous programme of CBS “Entertainment Tonight” , interviewed the actors on the set at Central Park. The atmosphere was very friendly, people joked in front of the camera, choking and opening a huge umbrella. The umbrella was not sponsorised by Pepsi or Coca but it had been furnished by an Italian Gourmet Company that through this has obtained great visibility of its brand, as big as the screen during a share of 12 millions of people. As many as during a football match. By sure a very lucky strike that derives from a precedent product placement action. In the movie there are 18 of such an umbrellas, placed here and there throughout Central Park. An idea of the product placement Agency that has followed and sustained this Italian Company and that was well appreciated by the producers of the movie, thus becoming part of this curious and nice Italo-American comedy.

Exactly in one week the most famous Irish Beer in the world will be 250 years old and lots of people believe the celebration will be unrestrained.Guinness likes promotional experiments, as its first example of viral marketing (not to speak about the famous idea of Guinness World Records) At the end of the 80’s there was a small disk with a strange game, where you have to pour draught beer: if you were too quick you lost. It was a genial game, you had fun, learnt how to pour rightly Guinness and connected its brand to millions of people, future Clients. That same idea, after years, has found its good place in Internet and nowadays the viral, the buzz, the guerrilla and other strategies of this kind have become the creative grandsons of this way of thinking.

At last yesterday new info about what’s happening in the marketing dept of Guinness have been whispered around: a GPS application to IPhone through which you can easily find out the nearest place where you can drink draught Guinness. Faithful to its proposition to protect the product quality, the same gadget contains even a manual with “the six steps to obtain a perfect draught beer”, besides a few screensavers and the necessary instructions to drink with moderation. Thus Guinness after videogames and Internet bets on mobiles and puts its logo on the display of any IPhone, for anyone that would like to spend one dollar and 99 to buy this application. And this is maybe the last strange fact. It is not a free gadget, but a sort of product placement paid by the public, and considering the number of lovers of such “Dark Lady”, it’s likely that Guinness could be right once again.

The American movie season has just closed and the first datas, lists and graphics have been published. Even this year the Brandcameo have been assigned to. The prizes that regard product placement, divided into different categories (the best scene, the best technological placement, the best reality placement, etc) have proposed even the worst ones. A very good signal of maturity by the market, of which the big Companies should always keep in mind

In the special list dedicated to the most present brands in the Hollywood Productions between August 2008 and August 2009, the first Italian brand is at the 30th place. It’s VESPA, with 3 placements seems to be the most loved product made in Italy in America.

At the first places we find brands of American cars, electronics gadgets like mobiles, MP3, videocameras, etc. Fashion seems to have a place apart, it seems to be absent from this list maybe because difficult to trace Its Company or too expensive to employ a quality standard for such a huge category. However our colors would be well represented maybe at the first places too, with brands such as Belstafff and Luxottica that have employed product placement as a good mean of promotion and development.

 To make a movie is really expensive. Nobody is willing to finance a movie by an unknown pdoducer. It’s difficult to find out somebody who wants to help you. Product placement is expensive too. Product placement can be employed only for important movies…. COMPLETELY WRONG !!!

People from Expertvillage think the same (http://www.expertvillage.com/categories.htm); they have dedicated a few tutorial videos (at least thirty) with the title of “How to make a movie” on this subject. One step after the other, where one steps is a 3-minute video, takes you to the realisation of the life dream… to become filmaker.

As consequence, Scott Dupont, the “working actor” (both actor and producer), and anchorman of these videos, has spent time on the chapter “to finance a movie” and above all on “product placement”. “If you are an independent producer with a movie with a small budget, do not go to Coca Cola to ask for money, that’s good stuff for Tom cruise; on the contrary try to keep in touch with local Companies interested to propser on the national market and propose them a semi-finished product”.

This and many more pieces of advice are proposed through the videos and represent a good starting point, or better very good. Good work !!!!

I would like to point out at your attention a portal for all the TV-movie lovers. Www.sharetv.org has almost 2000.000 subscribers and special resources. In practice a forum for discussion about any serial and cartoons of the present and the past (each with thousands of subscribers), updated news both on the productions as well as on the celebrities., the whole Tv scheduling divided into Countries (actually USA, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and Japan), a link dedicated to the Shows and obviously a newsletter to which you can freely subscribe. But the real treasure is the link to “watch on line”: more than 10.000 TV serial episodes of any kind and period, in alphabetical order, from A-Team to X-men passing through real pearls like Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Charlie Brown and the Snoopy Show, Kojak, besides most of the last generation serials. The web site has even its own Facebook and Twitter declination, that probably help to develop more widely the project and to admit new lovers.