Product Placement in One Tree Hill

I have watched some episodes of One Tree Hill in the past but for this particular assignment I watched episode 4, “An Attempt to Tip the Scales” in season 3. In this episode the seniors at Tree Hill High School are celebrating Halloween with a masquerade party. We see Lucas (Chad Michael Murray) trying to convince Brooke (Sophia Bush) to be in an exclusive relationship with him and Peyton (Hilarie Burton) trying to get to know her birth mother.

Looking up articles about product placement in One Tree Hill, I found that season 3 actually had the most product placement in it throughout the whole entire running of the show. The main product placement throughout season 3 is Sunkist.

According to an article that was published on hollywoodreporter.com on March 30, 2007, product placement like this allows a company with a much smaller marketing budget than its competitors to score high-profile integrations and branded entertainment campaigns. This allows the company that is getting the air time to not have to pay integration fees or up its media commitments in general to get the word out about their products.

This product placement in season 3 allowed Sunkist to get more exposure than they were getting at the time and it allowed for creative ideas in the episodes to involve Sunkist. In one episode Sunkist sponsored a fictional concert that raised money for breast cancer awareness. Then Sunkist actually backed a real life mall tour with the show’s cast to promote the season’s soundtrack and raise money for breast cancer awareness.

In this episode when you see Brooke going to talk to Nathan you get a glimpse of Spalding on the basketball that he shoots at the net. Spalding has been in a lot of episodes since the show talks a lot about basketball.

Another product placement in this episode is the phone that Nathan calls someone on when he is sitting at his desk in his room looking at pictures. You get a very quick glimpse of the AT&T symbol on the bottom of the phone. Something interesting that I noticed in this scene was that you never actually saw the bottom part of the computer that was at Nathan’s desk. I’m assuming that they didn’t show the bottom of the computer because it was most likely a product that didn’t pay the TV studio to be on the show.

The last product placement that I noticed in this particular episode was the Sunkist soda container behind the bar at the masquerade party. It was a very quick glimpse of the container that was behind the bar but you obviously noticed the container because it was bright orange. There were many other shots of the container throughout the scenes at the party but I noticed that they were not very long shots. To actually see the containers I had to pause the episode a couple of times to get a full glimpse of them. Someone who was not watching an episode for specific product placements would most likely not have caught the containers in the background.