The Year's Best (Read: Worst) Product Placements

Congratulations to the Ford Motor Co. for making suckers of us all. According to BrandChannel.com, Ford led all other brands in getting its products placed in feature films over the past year, often in slap-you-in-the-face obvious ways. Gosh, who doesn't love paying $11 to watch a commercial for American cars?

A lot of that ubiquity had to do with the Ford Crown Victoria, a model commonly used as taxicabs and police cruisers. But Ford's crowning achievement was in I Am Legend, where a new Mustang tore up the streets of a dystopian Manhattan. The Mustang also turned up in the year's most written-about orgy of product placement, Michael Bay's Transformers, although there it was relegated to the role of bad guy, General Motors having made a deal to have its cars play the heroes.

Also taking top honors in BrandChannel's survey (which covered the period from Jan. 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008) were Iron Man, which featured an utterly gratuitous plug for Burger King, and Sex and the City, which earned the coveted Film Whore Award for its shameless and pervasive brand shillage.