The King of Queens: Sitcom Blog

The sitcom I decided to watch was King of Queens because I felt that it would provide a decent amount of product placement also because I simply just enjoy the show. The episode I watched was “Sight Gag” and it was when Doug got Carrie a birthday present to get laser eye surgery. I was right about this show having a surplus amount of product placement. Within the first two minutes of the show there were three examples of product placement. In the opening credits I saw a can of Coca-Cola sitting on the bench, the main character Doug was wearing a Nike shirt in the first scene, and there was a brown paper bag with the Bloomingdales logo on it. Another example of product placement was slightly hidden in the scene. It was an InStyle magazine on a magazine rack in the back corner of the doctor office that Doug and Carrie were sitting in. Although the product was very hidden in the scene I was able to pick it out.

Within the show there are about 5-6 scenes that display examples of product placement. I knew this show had ample amounts of product placement which is why I thought this show was perfect for this blog. I never realized how much product placement there actually was until I looked in detail. I was able to look more in depth and found out that there were great examples of product placement. Within a 22-minute episode I was able to gather nine examples of product placement. Some scenes had multiple examples, and some only had one example. There are only two scenes that had one single product placement was the InStyle magazine example and another one which is later on in the episode. Every other scene has more than one example which I found to be very interesting. I have seen other sitcoms from that time period with minimal examples but The King of Queens had way more.

There is one scene in this episode that has four examples of product placement and the entire scene was only about 2-3 minutes in length. Doug and his friends are sitting in the garage watching TV and drinking beers and there was a Midas magnet on the fridge in the background. Also Deacon (Doug’s best friend in the show) was a wearing an Echo shirt which was a popular brand of clothing back then. Lastly, there were beer boxes stacked in the background, the one was Rolling Rock beer and the other box wasn’t clearly shown but it was a green box and I noticed that it was Moosehead beer. I was surprised to see that many examples of product placement in one short scene. To go back to my statement earlier about having two scenes with one individual example of product placement was toward the end of the episode were Deacon was wearing a pair of Nike air max 95’s. I found it interesting the fact that there were so many popular brands promoted in the episode such as, seeing Nike two separate times, the Coca-Cola can in the opening credits, and the beer companies.