Watch a Supercut of Every Example of Product Placement in Michael Bay’s Movies
If I had to pick the most egregious example of product placement ever, I would nominate the scene from Transformers: Age of Extinction, when the entire movie stops to examine the wreckage of a crash involving an alien spaceship and a Bud Light truck. The camera pans across a street littered with Bud Light bottles; then Mark Wahlberg picks one up, cracks it open, and takes a healthy swig. And while he’s shilling beer, there’s a second product placement in the background; just over his shoulder, very much in focus, is a giant Goodyear Tires sign.
It’s not exactly subtle. Nothing Michael Bay does is. For 20-plus years, Bay has produced some of the biggest, wildest, and loudest action movies in Hollywood. And his movies have also featured some of the most obvious and most egregious examples of product placement over that period.
It kind of makes sense; before he was Michael Bay, director of Transformers, he was Michael Bay, director of commercials. And he was very good at his job. The famous Got Milk? Ad where the guy misses out on $10 grand because he’s got a mouthful of peanut butter and can’t get out the words “Aaron Burr”? That was one of his.
Even as he became one of Hollywood’s busiest directors, Bay kept making commercials. Frankly, with Bay it can sometimes be hard to tell where the commercials end and the movie begins. That’s why we decided to see if we could find every example of product placement in the entire Bay filmography and count them up. The results are above. (Settle in, it’s pretty long.) Transformers: The Last Knight is in theaters now. Mark Wahlberg drinks a Bud Light in that one too.