The film and television industry in Indonesia has an enormous evolvement as seen from the variety of the shows –from quizzes, reality shows and movies. Indonesian production houses have released Indonesian movies for the enjoyment of Indonesian audiences. Heavy cost expenses to produce the movies has driven the production team to cooperate with external partners in the aim of sponsorship, mostly in a form of product placement inside the movies. The representation of product placement in Indonesian movies has been criticized by the critics, media and the audiences as blurring the boundaries between story content and promotional content. One of those Indonesian movies with product placement that got some negative critiques is “Habibie & Ainun”. This movie has a great feedback as seen from the storyline and the acting quality portrayed by the actors, hence the negative feedback because of the product placement. One of the products that placing some of their products in the movie is Gery Chocolatos, a wafer product from GarudaFood. Theory used for this thesis the message cycle on the Representation theory from Stuart Hall. The research method used is qualitative interpretive. The analysis method used for this research is data reduction from Miles & Huberman. Techniques used to collect all the data is document study, film study –to found the representation of Gery Chocolatos product placement featured in the movies, and in-depth interviews to the message producer, message distributor and the message consumption actors which are six interviewees from the age of 17-23, 24-30 and above 30 years old. From the research, the conclusion is the representation of product placement is not successfully distributed to the informants because the informant’s focuses are on the movie. The product placement was only seen by several informants.
Keywords: representation Stuart Hall, product placement, Indonesian movies, promotion