Wall Street 2, better known as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, was the top-grossing film in the nation this past weekend.

The hero of the original Wall Street, Bud Fox, was torn between siding with the unionized "working man" or the corporate-raiding embodiment of capitalism. The sequel no longer even bothers with the question, its hero a trader fully invested in working within the system of finance as our savior. The ostentatiousness of the first Wall Street film was found in the characters' ideals. The ostentatiousness of the sequel is all about the products, many of them placed. One of those products is itself.

One hopes Stone had a camera running during the studio marketing process because that will be the next Wall Street. A cutthroat campaign straight from Gordon Gekko's mind itself, the slam, bam, thank-you-ma'am publicity train started with Michael Douglas' cancer announcement and rolled right on through sponsoring a Sunday Football Night in America game, including special segments featuring former NFL players breaking down the New York Giants defense in slow motion. Meanwhile, an onslaught of television ads competed with midterm election spots for frequency.

A website for Gekko's fictional book "Is Greed Good?" was set up to drive to the film site. Some studio marketer even got the pleasure of populating Gordon Gekko's official Twitter feed. (234 followers currently.) On September 20, in an act that would have had Bud Fox choking on his tie in 1987, Oliver Stone rang the NASDAQ opening bell.

Maybe more telling than anything about the marketing of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is that it is rated PG-13. (The original is R.)

"Want a Heineken," asks Gordon Gekko moments before the beer's label slides in to fill the screen. The scene takes place at New York's Shun Lee restaurant, where staff confirmed to us that they do in fact serve Heineken. In the closing credits, the IWC logo floats over the screen like a reflection in a pool. Everything in between is branded. In fact, one difference between the first Wall Street and its sequel is that Money Never Sleeps has a credited crewmember (Allison Robin) responsible solely for "product placement."

Stone has gone on record to talk about how he involved Wall Street insiders to assure authenticity. But when it came to putting products in those authentic character' hands, it appears money ruled the day. Millionaire bankers drinking Moët? Sure. The suicidal choose Lay's chips as a last meal? Why not. Goldman Sachs-like titans of finance race Ducati bikes? Absolutely. That Bulgari is the ring of choice for bankers' fiancées may be true but there are other news sources than CNBC. Where the original Wall Street featured the iconic Leslie Buck-designed New York coffee cup, now everyone sips on Dunkin' Donuts.

What's more, these products are taking credit for their roles. Belstaff's website boasts of its Wall Street 2 role. Meanwhile, a press release for luxury watch brand IWC reads, "To show who's boss, standing out-in an understated way-is paramount in the cut-throat world of finance. Jacob Moore couldn't show his understanding of this philosophy any more-by sporting the IWC Portuguese Perpetual Calendar (Ref. IW502303), he is the true representation of the IWC guy, an educated, driven and talented man 'in the know' who has a passion for the finer things in life."

Below, a list of the brands we spotted that made a showing in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Shun Lee
Barton Perreira Halston
Bulgari
CNBC
Moët
Ducati
Vacheron Constantin
Belstaff
Lay's
Bed Bath and Beyond
NY Daily News
Nintendo
NY1
Jaeger-LeCoultre
Ferrari
Toyota
Jack Daniels
Ferragamo
Dunkin' Donuts
Voltz
Dow Jones
Blackberry
Gucci
The New York Post
Heineken
Degree
Johnnie Walker
Cracker Jacks
Forbes
Perrier
CNN
Bloomberg
Borders
Arai
LG
Patrón
Dell
Qdoba
Red Bull
CNBC
Apple
The Bowery Hotel

Ellen Mirojnick, Wall Street 2's costume designer, was also on the blitz, speaking with everyone from Bloomberg to the Chicago Tribune to The Wall Street Journal to make sure all of those brands in the film that could not be identified by label got their due credit, including Barton Perreira Halston sunglasses, Vacheron Constantin watches, Oscar de la Renta and Vera Wang gowns and Jaeger-LeCoultre, whatever it is that brand makes.

In Entertainment Weekly, Josh Brolin says he hopes audiences will see the film and wonder "How much is enough?" Meanwhile, in People, Brolin was grabbing Mirojnick and whispering that "he loved the maroon jacket that he wears in the film."

To listen to Stone, the sequel is a commentary on the way Wall Street has changed and become more greedy in the time since its 1987 predecessor. But the real commentary of Wall Street 2 is on the business of filmmaking itself. For lack of a better way to put it, product placement is now good. It appears, Oliver Stone loves Andacott Steel, as long as it's going to help pay for production.

Abe Sauer writes the annual Product Placement Awards and weekly product placement updates for Brandchannel.com

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Their story goes like this:

Moreover, BP doesn't solely provide gasoline to its franchises.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, purchasing gasoline from a given company does not mean the gasoline was produced by that particular company's refineries.

After oil companies such as BP extract crude oil from the ground, it is sent to the company's refineries to be refined into gasoline. The gasoline is then sent through shared pipelines or shipped in batches to storage terminals.

Anyone who wants to retail gasoline, such as grocery chains, can purchase this gasoline from BP's terminals as "unbranded" gasoline. It only becomes "branded" when BP injects its own additives into the gasoline, which is then sold to retailers

So it doesn't solely provide the gasoline, and then, oh, wait, their branded gasoline is actually "sold to retailers." Boy is that not helpful.

Also franchisees pay a 5 to 6 % royalty fee to BP during their 20-year contracts.

In the end, what do you do? I dunno? But, no matter what the real-world math is, I could no sooner bring myself to buy gas from a BP pump these days than I could fill up my car from crude floating up the beach.

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Newspapers, you say? Why yes!

Newspaper operating income for the quarter was $131 mn, up about 340% yoy, on a 21% increase in revenue.... Ad revenue at the Wall Street Journal and UK papers increased 25% and 10%, respectively.

If you really care, here's what Fox's trouble is said to be:

For 3Q, television revenue was 3% below, and operating income 21% below, our estimates. Station revenue grew 18% yoy (versus commentary of up 19% yoy when News Corp. last reported) on advertising momentum (category strength in autos and telecom) and retransmission revenue (we estimate 3 point benefit from Time Warner Cable), and station revenue growth flowed through to OI growth. But FOX network revenue fell about 4% yoy, and FOX network costs rose mid single digits yoy. We attribute the FOX network revenue shortfall in the face of an improving advertising environment primarily to non- sports ratings; total FOX network ratings were up about 9% yoy because of NFL games, but non-sports ratings were down about 10% yoy because of weakness at shows such as Idol, 24, and Bones.

It's always American Idol's fault!

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The whole "liveblogging" directive, though, was sort of odd, and not only because of the apt etiquette tip she gave out in a recent ad for Macy's. (It's "No Tweeting while eating"; one audience member asked her to utter it in the post-show Q & A scrum.) For one thing, the show was actually taped days in advance of its airing, meaning that all those #thetechshow-tagged Tweets were coming ahead of any regular old Martha viewers being able to follow along with them. And thanks to the screens in front of them, the audience seemed oddly distracted, trying to get on the studio's overloaded wireless connection and angling to appear on camera, even if it was only via icon-when they weren't staring at their devices, as captured nicely by this photo by Amy Oztan.

Not to mention that the Internet, despite its being confined to screens, is not the most televisual of mediums. The depiction of its non-streaming-video aspects on TV and in the movies hasn't evolved much since Sandra Bullock had her identity stolen in The Net-look at the screen, cock your head in a "concerned" way, maybe mouth along with what you're typing. Much of the show was like that, particularly a segment with a Yahoo!-employed talking head who made much of her stay-at-home-mom bona fides as she ran through her parent company's latest iteration of the portal concept. (The more things change....)

Twitter was the show's main focus, with three of its seven taped segments given over to it. Martha is a fairly active Tweeter-she noted during her powwow with co-founder Biz Stone that her 1.5 million-plus followers make her the 38th-most-popular member of the service, not that she's counting-and she's a great example of how the 2009 version of the Internet has hyper-compressed plain old celebrity culture. She posts brief updates on her dogs' health and truncated recipes, receiving replies from people who follow her empire. It's a low-risk, medium-reward proposition, and Twitter has relished its embrace by the star set, even going so far as to recommend famous peoples' accounts to follow to brand-new users. Meanwhile, the replies received by Stewart (and the other members of her galaxy) are the Web 2.no version of the fan letter, usually with trifling details about the non-famous person edited out and the agape adoration kept in.

That's not to say that the whole show was filled with bubble-borne puffery, though. In the first segment, Stewart cocked her eyebrow and bluntly asked Stone about Twitter's recent billion-dollar valuation. (I pretty much fell in love with her at this point.) Instead of being bowled over by This Thing Called The Internet, as so many other talk-show hosts might, Stewart exhibited more skepticism than 99% of the business reporters and other so-called "experts" out there, some of whom have tried to garner attention for themselves with claims that the microblogging service is really worth five to 10 times that. Of course, this could be in part because Stewart's a mogul in her own right, and she's acutely aware that her own company-which, you know, has actual revenue-generating arms-has a market cap at around one-fifth Twitter's.

So aside from freeing up money that might be spent on celebrity publicists, how exactly does Twitter's value come into play? Martha and Biz did bring up the service's parallels with Google, which was also seen as a probable money pit back in the day. But timing here is important, and in a society where people seem to be increasingly averse to ponying up for information, a service that relies on disseminating news in the briefest way possible seems to be something of a losing proposition for the long term. (Perhaps Twitter will become the new fan club?)

Revenue stream or no, Martha further showed her savvy when she told the cameras what her next show would be about: unplugging and heading into the great outdoors.

Maura Johnston is the editor of Idolator and the pop critic for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. She has been on the Internet longer than you.

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