By: Vicki K. Boykis

As regular readers of this blog know, Hillel is a huge enthusiast for all things Mac. So am I, having bought my first iMac two years ago and never looking back. Since then, I’ve also purchased an iPod (5th generation), and my husband bought an iPhone, which has bailed us out on numerous occasions. Recently, Hillel and I got into a conversation on Twitter about Mac product placement that started with the following Tweet:

That got me thinking. I’d also recently seen The Proposal with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, and the movie also had a huge amount of Macs:

Here’s one of them, at the Big Boss’s office, signifying that powerful people all have Macs:

And here’s another:

It continues like this for about the first half hour of the movie. Macs have also been sighted in hit blockbusters, from Legally Blonde, to Mission Impossible. In fact the website, Spot the Mac, where these screenshots are from, collects all instances of where the Mac is shown in movies. So, does Mac pay for product endorsement in movies?

The short answer is, no. Not directly. In a Washington Post article, the writer says ,

“Apple said it does not pay for product placement and would not discuss how its products make their way into television and films. But Apple was one of the first technology companies to hire someone in Los Angeles to get Mac products prominently displayed in hot TV shows and movies, said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, a high-tech research and consulting firm. Today, he said, all such companies — Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba — have strategic Hollywood initiatives, following Apple’s precedent”.

In fact, Apple was one of the first companies to hire someone to work on this, which resulted in key product placement in the ultra-popular U.S. version of the sitcom, The Office, in which an iPod becomes a sought-after present, resulting in all of the staff members wanting to trade their presents up for the iPod.

Although there hasn’t been any recent media uproar about Apple product placement like there was in 2006 and again in 2008, partly because Apple has its hands full dealing with the latest Microsoft marketing campaign, we could be seeing more of this in the future as Apple ramps up its visibility (is that even possible?) in media.

–Vicki