Complete Fakes

Picture the supermarket checkout belt spilling over with its bright cornucopia: a postmodern Dutch still life. A clutch of verdant canned vegetables sits between a squat box of Altril, that trusty laundry detergent for the German hausfrau, and this week's ALEXA magazine, whose cover asks searchingly, "White Jeans: Which Ones Don't Make You Look Fat?" A bottle of Glenwood single malt looms in the background, envy and privilege clinging almost palpably to its neck. Those Morphin headache tablets suggest a girl fallen on tough times, but the Safermo condom pack perks up the scene somewhat. Whose groceries are these?

Step back to peek at the shopper, but tread carefully as you do: The cameraman is hard on your heels, and we're losing daylight.

Welcome to the world behind the screen, as designed by Schein Berlin. Working out of an old nuts-and-bolts factory on the city's scrappy-chic thoroughfare Kastanienallee, the firm started five years ago to exploit a quirk in German media law: It's verboten to place real products in a TV show or film without explicitly labeling them as paid advertising. (Imagine a Bond flick in full compliance, bubbling madly with disclaimers like VH-1's Pop-Up Video.) Enter Schein, which designs fake everyday products of all kinds for use in TV shows, films, even video games. Their territory has extended beyond merely replacing real brands to inventing a panoply of props for Hollywood movies. (Fittingly, "Schein" means both "appearance" and "fake" in German.) Churning out soap, beer bottles, sex shop signage, law firm stationery, and even TV shows within TV shows within TV shows, the boys at Schein are more than just armchair experts on what makes consumer brands tick. Enter Schein's looking-glass world, and you may find your own work, reflected back with the tiniest wink and skew.

Enjoy Cocola!

"Until recently, German TV shows weren't allowed at all to earn money from product placement," says Henning Brehm, a designer with close-cropped brown hair and a round, impish face haloed in scruff. He works on Schein projects with fellow designer Jan Hülpüsch and photographer Daniel Porsdorf and creates real products at his own agency, Design Tourist. "The idea was to ensure that private companies had no influence over a TV program's content outside of the commercials," Brehm continues. While restrictions have relaxed for private channels, publicly funded TV stations cannot include undisclosed advertising within a show's content -- a rule still strictly enforced, as broadcasters ARD and ZDF learned in 2005 after surreptitiously inserting product placements within shows. "Even as restrictions have loosened, our products are often still more attractive, because [real products] involve all kinds of complicated contracts with the rights holders," Brehm says. "It just slows down an already chaotic, last-minute production schedule." Not only do "rights-free" products sidestep an increasingly complex set of EU product placement regulations, there is another unexpected benefit: "Product placement can actually have a negative impact on selling ad time," Brehm says. "With Pepsi products as part of the show, Coca-Cola doesn't buy ads." For long-running TV shows with reruns, flexible ad sales tactics are crucial.

Schein's game depends on instinct, speed, and volume. For the German TV show Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten (In Good Times and Bad), the firm typically cranks out a dozen new products per week -- more than 500 so far. "Usually we can figure out most of what we need to design, just from the descriptions of people in the scripts," Brehm explains. Zip through the script, hit grocery stores and the internet, bang out some sprightly fakes, run their would-be brand names past the copyright office for conflicts, and poof! A bewildering variety of plausible fakes is born. Then, of course, come the last-minute requests, like a beer that teachers might drink after a handball match or a women's magazine flipped through distractedly at the dentist's office.

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