Product placement in Cast Away

The movie Cast Away staring the famous actor Tom Hanks and directed by a well known director called Robert L. Zemeckis was a box office success. The movie’s plot is about a FedEx CEO that’s been in a plane crash, and found himself lost in a deserted island.

Not only Cast Away was a great movie, it was also a great example of product placement, it’s almost impossible to miss the FedEx building, boxes, sings, airplane, packages and cars in the movie. In sociology product placement is defined as an advertisement that is placed in movies and music video and not in ads. We see them without realizing that they are advertising their products. Moreover, in most cases the companies pay to be in those movies.

Tom Hanks or chuck as he is known in the movie was flying in a FedEx airplane, the only thing he had with him in that island was the FedEx packages and there’s a famous scene in the movie where he starts opening the boxes and FedEx’s leftovers basically to find things to help him survive on this island. In that process he finds a volley ball that he calls Wilson and puts his bloody hands on it to make a face, and later on it becomes a character in the movie. Not only that the volley ball was an example of product placement and co-starred with Tom Hanks, Wilson the Castaway volley ball was being sold on Amazon.com, after the movie was shown. This took product placement to a whole other level as it made the audience bond with the product and it had an important part of the movie.


Cast Away is one of the best movies for product placement. Moreover, the only thing Tom Hanks had in that island was Wilson and FedEx, you can literally overdose from seeing that much FedEx logos in one movie. Yet, ironically FedEx did not pay anything to be in this movie. And it’s an ongoing debate for wither Cast Away was good advertisement for FedEx or not because their plane did crash but Chuck delivered the packages at the end of the movie so that’s good. However, Wilson Sporting Goods Company paid for Wilson to be in the movie and also it was a different form of product placement since he was somehow a character in the movie. I personally think it was a huge success in terms of advertising for both products and for FedEx in particular.