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[Cody]

The marketing executive who negotiated the product placement/tie-in deals for films in the Brosnan era has passed away. Here's an article that talks about her 007 connections:

Karen Sortito, a movie-marketing executive who pushed the limits of product tie-ins when she put the world’s most famous Aston Martin driver, James Bond, behind the wheel of a BMW and put him in business with Visa cards, Smirnoff vodka, Heineken beer and even L’Oréal lipstick (“Bond Bordeaux”), died in Manhattan on Monday. She was 49.

The cause was cancer, her sister Diane Ritucci said.

A specıalıst in what marketers call brand enhancement, Ms. Sortito was at the forefront in a relatively new era of product tie-ins in the movies. (The era is generally acknowledged to have begun in 1982, when the shy, stranded alien in “E.T.” is lured out of hiding with a trail of Reese’s Pieces.) Moving from New York to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, she worked for 20th Century Fox, MGM/UA and other Hollywood film companies, earning a reputation for being a character herself, brash, spikily intelligent and forthright to a fault.

“If she was passionate about something, you didn’t want to be on the other side of the table,” said Tom Sherak, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who was her boss at Fox and at Revolution Studios. “I once bought her a pair of boxing gloves.”

Ms. Sortito came to prominence in 1995 when, helping to rejuvenate the James Bond franchise for MGM, she created a tie-in for the film “GoldenEye” with BMW, putting a new Bond (Pierce Brosnan) in a new model, the sleek and sporty Z3; sales of the car spiked (Ms. Sortito bought one herself), and the film was No. 1 at the box office its opening week.

For the next Bond film, “Tomorrow Never Dies” in 1997, the studio ordered up a $100 million promotional campaign, and Ms. Sortito engineered product tie-ins with Visa (Mr. Brosnan as Bond appeared in television commercials using a Visa card), L’Oréal, Ericsson cellphones, Heineken, Avis rental cars and Omega watches, in addition to BMW.

The film earned more than $333 million worldwide, but the product-placement saturation campaign was criticized as interfering with the art of filmmaking and cheapening Bond’s image.

“Perhaps the problem is that a lot of these products are kind of pedestrian,” an article in The New York Times, headlined “Agent 007: License to Shill,” suggested in 1997. “Bond and Heineken? Beer cans, unlike martinis, are not supposed to be shaken. Bond and Avis? Avis may boast that ‘We Try Harder,’ but the real Bond makes everything look effortless.”

Ms. Sortito defended the tie-ins. “It’s all cool and hip,” she said at the time. “If this wasn’t creative, we would not be doing it.”

Karen Christine Sortito was born in New Haven on Sept. 8, 1961. Her father, John, worked for the New Haven Parking Authority; her mother, Phyllis, was a bookkeeper. A graduate of Southern Connecticut State University, she worked at the fledgling cable channel MTV, rising to director of marketing and promotion.

Most recently she headed the entertainment division of NYC and Company, the city’s marketing and tourism organization. She created promotions to coincide with the 2007 release of “Spider-Man 3” and a celebration of the 40th anniversary of “Sesame Street” in 2009.

In addition to her sister Diane, of Woodbridge, Conn., Ms. Sortito is survived by her mother, of Branford, Conn., and a second sister, Maria, also of Woodbridge.

Ms. Sortito was never one to shy away from an outlandish idea. She once suggested a Bond tie-in to the lingerie maker Victoria’s Secret, in which an actress would be clad in a diamond-studded bra that also happened to spray nerve gas.

“I thought it was campy,” Ms. Sortito explained to the trade magazine Brandweek. “The filmmakers thought it was crass.”