“Branded” is a new weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture.
Reality-show twists can be predictable: someone will betray someone else; someone will get into a shouting match or a slap fight; someone will hook up. But recently the Netflix series The Ultimatum has offered a genuinely novel subplot: What’s up with all those silver goblets? The answer may be one of the most subtly effective branding gambits of the year.
The explanation, it turns out, is a kind of inadvertent branding strategy, cross-matched with consumer merch madness—that peculiar hunger for linking pop culture fandom to all manner of material goods.
Someone at the show clearly recognized the utility or potential in these props, because in season two, which debuted earlier this year, the gold-colored wine glasses were, if not quite ubiquitous, definitely hard to miss. They cropped up not only in the studio but also at picnics on the beach, at the couples’ apartments, in their potential in-laws’ homes, and even at their weddings.
Or maybe the product being promoted is the drinkware, too? The consternation about the distracting goblets overlapped almost exactly with the question of how and where to buy them. Refinery29, citing an anonymous producer on the show, soon revealed that the show used metallic drinkware from VonShef, then available on Amazon (but promptly sold out).
“The silver goblets in The Ultimatum are an homage to the gold goblets in Love Is Blind,” Coelen told a different interviewer. “We think the goblets are a subtle but fun way to tie the elements of each show together.”
Again: branding. But by this point there wasn’t all that much subtlety about it. The show’s official Twitter account openly joked about the goblets. And in a “reunion” episode, a pregnant couple is winkingly gifted a silver goblet sippy cup.
the goblets watching the drama in ever scene like pic.twitter.com/7MOZCq04io
— The Ultimatum (@TheUltimatum) April 14, 2022
It should be noted that as a piece of set décor, an opaque drinking vessel has a very practical use in a (heavily edited) reality show. “When putting together a video, editors will often swap the order of clips, piecing together dialogue to fit a storyline or making a more sensical order,” a Food52 contributor with a food video background explained. “Things like noticeably empty drink cups that were delivered to the table five seconds ago can throw a wrench in an editor’s ability to manipulate the show’s order.” According to The Daily Beast, similarly metallic and opaque drinkware has popped up on other Netflix reality shows The Circle and Too Hot To Handle.
