Karen Sortito
Specialist on brand enhancement (1961-2010)
Karen Christine Sortito (September 8, 1961 – December 13, 2010) was a specialist in brand enhancement and product placement. Sortito was a pioneer in product tie-ins in movies. An example of one of the first product tie-ins was in the movie E.T. In the story, the stranded alien character, E.T. was lured out of hiding with a trail of Reese's Pieces.
Karen Sortito was born in New Haven, Connecticut. Her father, John, worked for the New Haven Parking Authority; her mother, Phyllis, was a bookkeeper. Sortito was a graduate of Southern Connecticut State University where she worked at the fledgling cable channel MTV. While there she rose to director of marketing and promotion. Later, Sortito moved from New York to Los Angeles in the late 1980s. While in Los Angeles, she worked for 20th Century Fox, MGM/UA among other Hollywood film companies. While there she earned a reputation for being a brash, intelligent and forthright character.
Sortito came to prominence in 1995 when she created the BMW product tie-in for the James Bond film GoldenEye.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karen Sortito” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.