Late last year Paramount Pictures, makers of “The Love Guru,” Myers' newest cinematic feat, asked Cinnabon to construct a unit in a Toronto airport specifically for the movie's airport scene. Myers, it turns out, is a fan of the brand and had written the yummy rolls into the script.

The QSR jumped at the chance, happy to hear that it had a celebrity fan and an opportunity to spread the word about the concept to its target market. The audience for “The Love Guru” tied in nicely with Cinnabon's target customer: the teenage male.

That demographic has a wide cross-section of opportunities where they may encounter a Cinnabon. The concept has 65 units in airports and others in malls, universities, casinos, amusement parks, military bases, train stations and travel plazas. The chain says 89 percent of its units are in airports, malls and travel plazas, with the remaining 11 percent on military bases, academic campuses and similar nontraditional sites.

“People do not go to an airport to go to Cinnabon. It is an impulse item,” explains Jason Simons, director of marketing for Cinnabon. “With the movie, we suddenly have the opportunity to get outside the four walls of the bakery.”

Comedian Mike Myers' latest box-office take wasn't huge, but a tie-in with his movie did have a positive sales impact for Cinnabon.

“We can take an impulse product and convert that into a purchase,” Simons says.

Product placement is no longer limited to a character drinking a soda in a movie or TV show. Brand names appear in song titles, video games and more. During the first half of 2007, there were 25,497 consumer-packaged-goods product placements on the prime-time entertainment programs tracked by the Nielsen Product Placement Service. In a 2007 report, Stamford, Conn.-based PQ Media estimated that global paid product placement grew 37 percent to $3.36 billion in 2006 and another 30 percent to $4.38 billion in 2007. The United States remains the largest global market for product placement, with projected spending of $3.79 billion and growth of 31 percent in 2007, according to PQ Media.

The types of tie-ins are becoming more elaborate, as well as more commonplace. In addition to building the Toronto airport unit, which was used for the movie only and is not an operational new location, Cinnabon created T-shirts for employees, specialty cups, posters and other in-store materials that replicated the look and feel of the movie, says Melissa Smith, director of account services at Orange County, Calif.'s HL2, the chain's ad agency.

Having a mindset toward expanding its reach is part of the concept's history. The Cinnabon chain was founded in Seattle in 1985 selling only classic cinnamon rolls. Now it is part of the Atlanta-based Focus Brands portfolio and has a bigger menu, with beverages it hopes will be-come a larger part of its sales.

Cinnabon introduced its L.O.V.E. Chillatta, with ginseng and taurine, as part of its Love Guru promotion.

“That was one of the creative paths we took, to use those movie acronyms in our efforts,” Simons says. The ideas were created by HL2 and Cinnabon, but had to be approved by Paramount Pictures.

Some Hindu leaders objected to the portrayal of their religion in the film, and the movie did not perform as well as previous Myers movies, such as the Austin Powers series. Of course, the Cinnabon team would have loved to have been tied-in with a mega-hit, but, in this case, the success of the promotion did not necessarily hinge on the success of the movie, Smith says.

One scene in “The Love Guru” features fans wearing T-shirts during a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game. Cinnabon created similar shirts for its crew to wear during the promotion.

The bulk of that advance work came before the movie opened June 20. During its opening weekend, the movie ranked No. 4 in the box-office race, taking in $14 million that first critical weekend, according to Media By Numbers LLC.Those numbers—and the pre-opening buzz, both good and bad—helped raise awareness of Cinnabon among tweens and teens, Simons says.

The chain has been happy with the results. Beverage sales, including those for the L.O.V.E. Chillatta, increased as a result of the promotion, although Cinnabon will not disclose sales figures. The brand decided to extend the L.O.V.E. Chillatta promotion through September because of its success. “This helped us extend the success of our specialty beverage line,” Simons says.

While Cinnabon has had other TV and movie product promotion experience—including bon mots from Jerry Seinfeld to references on “The Office” and “Live with Regis and Kelly”—“The Love Guru” was the largest to date. “As a result of this, our phones have been ringing from different movie production houses about other future movie deals,” adds Simons.