Product placement, or embedded marketing, is a form of advertisement, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, music videos, the story line of television shows, or news programs. The product placement is often not disclosed at the time that the good or service is featured. Product placement became common in the 1990s, until the ramifications of product placement were clearly understood.
In April 2006, Broadcasting & Cable reported, "Two thirds of advertisers employ 'branded entertainment'—product placement—with the vast majority of that (80%) in commercial TV programming." The story, based on a survey by the Association of National Advertisers, said "Reasons for using in-show plugs varied from 'stronger emotional connection' to better dovetailing with relevant content, to targeting a specific group."
Measuring effectiveness
Quantification methods track brand integrations, with both basic quantitative and more demonstrative qualitative systems used to determine the cost and effective media value of a placement. Rating systems measure the type of placement and on-screen exposure is gauged by audience recall rates. Products might be featured but hardly identifiable, clearly identifiable, long or recurrent in exposure, associated with a main character, verbally mentioned and/or they may play a key role in the storyline. Media values are also weighed over time, depending on a specific product's degree of presence in the market.
Consumer response and economic impact
As with any advertising, its effectiveness tends to be assumed because advertisers continue to use product placement as a marketing strategy. However, some consumer groups such as Commercial Alert object to the practice as "an affront to basic honesty"[19] that they claim is too common in today's society. Commercial Alert asks for full disclosure of all product-placement arrangements, arguing that most product placements are deceptive and not clearly disclosed. It advocates notification before and during television programs with embedded advertisements. One justification for this is to allow greater parental control for children, whom it claims are easily influenced by product placement.
The Writers Guild of America, a trade union representing authors of television scripts, had raised objections in 2005 that its members are forced to write ad copy disguised as storyline on the grounds that "the result is that tens of millions of viewers are sometimes being sold products without their knowledge, sold in opaque, subliminal ways and sold in violation of government regulations."[20]
According to PQ Media, a consulting firm that tracks alternative media spending, 2006 product placement was estimated at $3.1 billion rising to $5.6 billion in 2010. However, these figures are somewhat misleading in PQ Media's view in that today, many product-placement and brand-integration deals are a combination of advertising and product placement. In these deals, the product placement is often contingent upon the purchase of advertising revenues. When the product placement that is bundled with advertising is allocated to part of the spending, PQ Media estimates that product placement is closer to $7 billion in value, rising to $10 billion by 2010.[citation needed]
In a June 2010 research report, "PQ Media Global Branded Entertainment Marketing Forecast," the research firm reported that paid product placement spending – in television, films, internet, video games and other media – declined in 2009 for the first time in tracked history, as spending decreased 2.8% to $3.61 billion due to severe reductions in brand marketers' budgets. However, paid product placement is also one of the sectors poised for the most growth, with PQ Media predicting the 2009 figures to more than double by 2014, when product placement is projected to be a $6.1 billion market.[21]
A major driver of growth for the use of product placement is the increasing use of digital video recorders (DVR) such as TiVO, which enable viewers to skip advertisements.[citation needed] This ad-skipping behavior increases in frequency the longer a household has owned a DVR.
Products
Certain products are featured more than others. Commonly seen are automobiles, consumer electronics and computers, and tobacco products.[citation needed]
Automobiles
The most common products to be promoted in this way are automobiles. Frequently, all the important vehicles in a film or television series will be supplied by one manufacturer. For example, the television series The X-Files (1993–2002) uses Fords, as do leading characters on the television series 24 (2001–2010).
The James Bond film series pioneered such placement.[22] The Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) features extensive use of AMC cars, even in scenes in Thailand, where AMC cars were not sold, and had the steering wheel on the wrong side of the vehicle for the country's roads. The two prior Bond films use vehicles from Ford or its subsidiaries.
Almost every car was made by General Motors in the films Bad Boys II (2003), The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and Transformers (2007).
In the film XXY (2007) all vehicles depicted are Toyotas, even though the film takes place in South America; the film's credits acknowledge the automaker as having funded portions of the film's production.
Other times, vehicles or other products take on such key roles in the film it is as if they are another character. Nissan cars feature prominently in the television series Heroes (2006–2010) where the logos often zoom in/out of or whole cars are shown for a few seconds at the beginning of a new scene. In the film The Matrix Reloaded, a key chase scene is conducted between a brand new Cadillac CTS and a Cadillac Escalade EXT. The chase scene also features a Ducati motorcycle in the getaway.
Three of the Bond films that star Pierce Brosnan feature a BMW car.[clarification needed] After pressure from fans, the producers returned to using the traditional Aston Martin, which was owned by Ford Motor Company at the time and thus brought in more product placement.
A Ford Shelby GT500 is used extensively at the beginning of the film I Am Legend (2007) along with a Ford Expedition EL.
In the film Taken (2008), Liam Neeson's character drives Audi cars, first an A3 and then an S8 in the final high-speed scene on the streets of Paris, France.
All the cars in the video game Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (2008) are manufactured by Dodge.
Consumer electronics and computers
The film Casino Royale (2006) features many Sony product placements throughout: A BD-R disc is prominently portrayed at one time, all characters useVAIO laptops, Sony Ericsson cell phones and global-positioning systems, BRAVIA televisions, and Bond uses a Cyber-shot camera to take photographs. (It was the first Bond film to be produced after Sony acquired the Bond franchise). In Quantum of Solace (2008), Bond, M, and Tanner are seen using aMicrosoft Surface to display information on rogue agents.
Apple frequently pays for product placement. This occurs because Apple "barters" the exchange for placement. Payment for placement is not in cash, but exchanged for product and services.[23] (Notably, recognizable Apple products have appeared in newspaper comic strips, including Opus, Baby Blues, Non Sequitur, and FoxTrot, even though paid placement in comics is all but unknown.) In a twist on traditional product placement, Hewlett-Packard computers now appear exclusively as part of photo layouts in the IKEA catalog in addition to placing plastic models of its computers in IKEA stores, having taken over Apple's position in the Swedish furniture retailer's promotional materials several years ago. Hewlett-Packard also put their computers in the U.S. production of The Office. Throughout the television series Smallville (since 2001), only computers produced by Dell are used, including Alienware branded equipment and in later series the XPS range. Similarly in the series Stargate Atlantis in first sessions all the laptops used were Dell Latitude and XPS laptops.Stargate SG1 in its last seasons switched from traditional CRT monitors in the gate-rooms to Dell-branded LCDs.
In WarGames (1983), the use of an IMSAI 8080 desktop computer was originally proposed by Cliff McMullen of Unique Products, the same Los Angelesproduct placement company that placed Reese's Pieces in Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).[24] Other WarGames product placements include the main character's mother being portrayed as a real estate broker at the behest of marketers at Century 21.
In the film Splash (1984), a television set blares advertisements for (now-defunct) electronics retailer Crazy Eddie and for Bloomingdale's department store.
In the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) various Microsoft devices—including mobile phones, laptops[citation needed], and Microsoft Surface—were used.
In video games, products that most often appear are placements for processors or graphics cards. For example in EA's Battlefield 2142, ads for Intel Core 2 processors appear on map billboards. EA's The Sims contains in-game advertising for Intel and for McDonald's.Rare's Perfect Dark: zerofeatures many adds for samsung in their menu's.[25]
In the video game F.E.A.R, all of the laptops have a Dell screensaver on them and the other computers in the game also feature this screensaver. Similarly, Metal Gear Solid 4 features various Apple products such as laptop and desktop computers, as well as featuring an in-game iPod. Most characters in this game have Sony cellular phones.
In the television series Sex and The City, the character Carrie is shown using an Apple PowerBook G3 laptop.
In the video game Burnout Paradise advertisements in the virtual Paradise City are placed as they may be in the real world, including travelling vans with advertisements for Gillette Fusion razors and DIESEL clothing, and on various billboards.
Food and drink
In Beetlejuice (1988), Minute Maid juice is displayed; in the Back to the Future trilogy, Pizza Hut's products in 2015 include an instant pizza that can be hydrated for immediate consumption.
In Godzilla (1998) Pepsi, Hershey's, and most prominently Taco Bell, are featured in various scenes.
The film "One, Two, Three" (1961) Stars James Cagney as a Coca Cola executive in West Berlin. The twist at the end is he removes a bottle of Pepsi from a vending machine at the end of the film.[26]
In American Idol Coca-Cola cups are always seen on the judges' table.
In Eminem's music video Love the Way you Lie (2010), Stolichnaya vodka was included in several scenes. The product placement begins with actorDominic Monaghan stealing a bottle of the vodka, after which he and actress Megan Fox drink from it on the roof of the liquor store.[27]
In the game Need for Speed: Most Wanted there are several ads for Burger King, such as bilboards and restaurants.
In addition to placing brand specific elements within the context of a given program, entire formats of media have been created to feature individual brands within the context of a genre. An example of this is The Corkscrew Diary (2006),[28] in which this travelogue about wine and food features emerging destination estates and the wines they produce.
Travel
The promotion of individual travel destinations and services ranges from subtle to overt.
While the award of "an all expense-paid trip" to some destination as a game show prize or an acknowledgement in a show's closing credits that transportation for participants was provided by a specific airline had long been commonplace in commercial television, a more refined approach to promoting a travel destination is to assist and subsidise film production companies willing to set their story in or shoot footage on-location at the destination being promoted.
A movie set in an individual travel destination can be a valuable advertisement. According to State of Florida film commissioner Paul Sirmons, "the moviescreate huge, larger-than-life ads for where they are shot. CSI: Miami draws people from overseas to Miami. Seaside, was put on the map by 'The Truman Show [(1998)] Movies just keep playing year after year getting the images out there."[29]
The television series The Love Boat (1977–1986) was set aboard the Pacific Princess, a ship of the Princess Cruise Lines. As an advertisement, this product placement was valuable enough that printed advertisements for the line would employ the trademarked slogan "It's more than a cruise, it's the Love Boat"[30] until 2002.[31]
A fictional Pan Am "Space Clipper," a commercial spaceplane called the Orion III, had a prominent role in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey, featured in the movie's poster.[32] The film's sequel, 2010, also featured Pan Am in a background television commercial in the home of David Bowman's widow. In the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica, one of the ships in the fleet is a "Pan Galactic" or "Pan Gal" starliner. The ship bears Pan Am colors and the Pan Gal logo is nearly identical to Pan American's old logo.
The airline's 707 appeared in several James Bond films including Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Casino Royale, while a Pan Am 747 and the Worldport appeared in Live and Let Die. The airline's logo was featured in Licence to Kill, where James Bond checks in for a Pan Am flight that he ultimately does not board.
[edit]Tobacco
Tobacco companies have made direct payment to stars for using their cigarettes in films. Documentation of $500,000 in payments to Sylvester Stallone to "use Brown and Williamson tobacco products in no less than five feature films" [33][34] is accessible online as part of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.[35]
The James Bond film Licence to Kill (1989) featured use of the Lark brand of cigarette and the producers accepted payment for that product placement. The studio's executives apparently believed that the placement triggered the American warning notice requirement for cigarette advertisements and thus the movie carried the Surgeon General's Warning at the end credits of the film. This brought forth calls for banning such cigarette advertisements in future films. Later releases of License to Kill, especially for video and television releases, had the Lark pack replaced with a similar-looking, generic pack. Most movies, such as the youth-targeted Ramen Girl, which has a product placement for Marlboro cigarettes, omit the Surgeon General's Warning.
Reviewing previously secret tobacco advertising documents, the British Medical Journal concluded:
The tobacco industry recruits new smokers by associating its products with fun, excitement, sex, wealth, and power and as a means of expressing rebellion and independence. One of the ways it has found to promote these associations has been to encourage smoking in entertainment productions.1 Exposure to smoking in entertainment media is associated with increased smoking and favourable attitudes towards tobacco use among adolescents.
While the tobacco industry has routinely denied active involvement in entertainment programming, previously secret tobacco industry documents made available in the USA show that the industry has had a long and deep relationship with Hollywood. Placing tobacco products in movies and on television (fig 1Go), encouraging celebrity use and endorsement, advertising in entertainment oriented magazines, designing advertising campaigns to reflect Hollywood glamour, and sponsoring entertainment oriented events have all been part of the industry's relationship with the entertainment industry.
-- How the tobacco industry built its relationship with Hollywood, BMJ 2002[36]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_placement
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