Hollywood's Blockbuster Role for Product Placement

Marketers from Audi to Nokia to GM are turning to hot shops like Ruben Igielko-Herrlich's Propaganda to get their wares into hit movies

Igielko-Herrlich's clients range from Nokia to luxury carmaker Lamborghini Max S. Gerber

By Ronald Grover

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When Audi was looking to win screen time for one of its cars in this year's crop of summer films, it turned to Ruben Igielko-Herrlich, whose Geneva-based shop, Propaganda Global Entertainment Marketing, helps companies place their products in films, TV shows, and games.

Igielko-Herrlich zeroed in on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Yes, General Motors had already cut a deal to make its cars morph into the sci-fi flick's superhero robots. But Igielko-Herrlich had an inside track: For years his company had provided director Michael Bay with products—cars, cell phones, luggage—for his films. Propaganda talked Bay's people into finding a role in Transformers for the Audi R8. Ultimately, the super-luxe sports sedan starred as the "villain" car and got an extra marketing boost as the only vehicle to appear in the Transformers Super Bowl commercial. "No one knows his way through Hollywood like Ruben," says Audi's marketing vice-president, Scott Keogh. "It can be a crazy place, but he stays calm through the nuttiness."

Plenty of companies are beating a path to Igielko-Herrlich's door these days. In the past year, Propaganda has signed up six new clients, including Proctor & Gamble (PG), which wants screen time for its new pregnancy test, and Italian shoemaker Santoni. Nasdaq hired him as well, the first time it has used an agency after years of its HQ showing up as a backdrop in movies and TV shows.

Firms like Propaganda are in a sweet spot right now. TV audiences are fragmenting, and more and more viewers are skipping through commercials and heading to the Web. Advertisers, their budgets tight in a slack economy, see product placement as one of the most efficient ways to put their brands and products in front of large numbers of people. Blockbuster movies are particularly attractive because they reach an international audience of hundreds of millions—in the cinema and on DVD. Blockbusters are Propaganda's specialty.

Igielko-Herrlich (pronounced E-Yelko Herlick) took a roundabout route to Hollywood. His family emigrated from his native Cuba to Switzerland after the 1959 revolution. In 1981 he moved to the U.S. to get an MBA and for a while worked in New York as a commodities trader. He left the Street to become a sales executive for a series of luxury-goods purveyors, including Gianni Bulgari. MGM approached him to put Bulgari's jewels in its film Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. "I figured there had to be a business there," Igielko-Herrlich recalls, and in 1991, with partner Anders Granath, he set up shop in Switzerland. At the outset, they specialized in luxury clients, including Rimowa, the high-end German luggage maker whose briefcase everyone fought over in the 1998 spy thriller Ronin.

Igielko-Herrlich's breakthrough came with 1999's The Matrix, which established him as someone who could sniff out a blockbuster. At the time, Nokia (NOK) was introducing a Web-surfing phone, one of the first. Igielko-Herrlich persuaded directors Andy and Larry Wachowski to use a version of it in the movie as a portal through which the star, Keanu Reeves, entered the digital world of the film's title. The Matrix became a huge hit—and so did Nokia's 7110 phone.

Today, Propaganda has offices in 11 cities around the world, including Tokyo, Rome, and London, set up to minister to an international roster of 30 clients. Working from a cramped Culver City (Calif.) office not far from Sony's studios and stuffed with samples of his clients' wares, Igielko-Herrlich, 49, looks every bit the Hollywood dude. Six-feet-one, with a mane of blond curls and the industry's requisite two-day stubble, he has been known to get around Los Angeles on a red motorcycle made by Italy's MV Agusta (a client, of course).

The trick in the product-placement game is matching the right movie with the right client.

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