Product Placement
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Wikipedia-Article "Product Placement"
Product placement is a promotional tactic used by marketers in which characters in a fictional play, feature film, television series, music video, video-game or book use a real commercial product. Typically either the product and logo is shown or favorable qualities of the product are mentioned. The product price is not mentioned nor are any negative features or comparisons to similar products. Very generally, product placement involves placing a product in highly visible situations. The most common form is movie and television placements.
Product placement on television dates to its earliest days. Soap operas earned their moniker because they were brought to us by the soap companies. Classic shows such as Bonanza were filmed in color because the show’s sponsor was RCA and they wanted to sell more TV sets. Cigarette companies took advantage of the practice as well. The good guys smoked, not the villains so more cigarettes could be sold. In movies, an early example of product placement is the 1949 film Love Happy, in which Harpo Marx cavorts on a rooftop among various billboards and at one point escapes from the villains on the old Mobil logo, the "Flying Red Horse".
A later but better-known instance of product placement can be seen in the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which helped launch Reese's Pieces from Hershey Foods Corporation. The film The Truman Show explores the idea of a 24-hour on-air reality television program funded entirely by product placement.
Product placement companies work to ensure that their clients’ products receive maximum screen time and exposure - whether it be the Nokia phone that Agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) uses on Alias, the Lacoste polo shirt that Alex Hitchens (Will Smith) wears in the feature film Hitch or the Rimowa pilot case Gil Grissom (William L. Petersen) carries as he arrives at crime scenes on CSI.
Product placement can be seen as a modern version of the exhibit displays seen at world's fairs, concerts, sporting events, or anywhere that large numbers of potential customers gathered.
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Types of product placement
The most basic form of product placement is the inclusion of a product name or logo in the foreground or background of a scene. Payments are based on exposure, including the number of times the product is shown or mentioned, the duration of that exposure, and the degree of inclusion of the product in the story line. If the product is actively used (such as when a leading character can be clearly seen to take a drink from the bottle or can), placement fees may be higher.
Other times, product usage is negotiated rather than paid for. Some placements provide productions with below-the-line savings, with products such as props, clothes and cars being loaned for the production’s use, thereby saving them purchase or rental fees. Barter systems (the director/actor/producer wants one for himself) and service deals (cellular phones provided for crew use, for instance) are also common practices. Producers may also seek out companies for product placements as another savings or revenue stream for the movie, with, for example, products used in exchange for help funding advertisements tied-in with a film's release, a show's new season or other event.
The most common products to be promoted in this way are automobiles. Frequently, all the important vehicles in a movie or television serial will be supplied by one manufacturer. For example, The X-Files used Fords, as do leading characters on 24. The James Bond films were pioneers of such placement: the 1974 film The Man with the Golden Gun featured 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. Other times, vehicles or other products take on such key roles in the film it is as if they are another character. Examples of this practice include the placement of Audi in I, Robot and The Transporter 2 or the Nokia phone in Cellular.
More recently, Apple Computer frequently places its products in films and on television, where they therefore seem much more common than in most real-world offices and homes. 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 similar position in the Swedish furniture retailer's promotional materials several years ago.
A variant of product placement is advertisement placement. In this case an advertisement for the product (rather than the product itself) is seen in the movie or television series. Examples include a Lucky Strike cigarette advertisement on a billboard or a truck with a milk advertisement on its trailer.
Product placement is also used in books (particularly novels) and video games—where sometimes the economics are reversed, and video game makers pay for the rights to use real sports teams and players.
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 onscreen 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.
Controversy
The James Bond film Licence to Kill 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 picture 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.
Some believe product placement is out of control and has become too pervasive in today's society. One group known as Commercial Alert asks for full disclosure of all product placement arrangements. They feel that most product placements are deceptive and are not fully or clearly disclosed, advocating notification of embedded advertisements before and during a television program. One justification for this is that it allows greater parental control for children, who are said to be influenced greatly by product placement.
Spoofs
The concept of product placement has been spoofed many times. Notable examples include:
- Douglas Coupland's second novel, Shampoo Planet, satirizes product placement by mentioning invented brand names (including their trademark symbols) for a wide variety of products throughout the text.
- David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, set in the near future, years are not known by numbers but by a brand name such as "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment". This is known as "Subsidized time".
- The movie Wayne's World has a scene where Wayne and Garth spoof common commercials of the early '90s in the actual film in a way that parodies the way that corporate sponsorship affects television programs (the context of the scene is that they don't want a local arcade to sponsor their public-access cable show). This scene, due to its blatant use of different products (Pizza Hut, Pepsi, Nuprin), is commonly edited out of rebroadcasts of the film.
- The interactive fiction game Coke Is It! consists of excerpts from classic text adventure games (such as Adventure) with humorously exaggerated product placement by The Coca-Cola Company.
- A product non-placement spoof was done in the film Repo Man, in which cans of beer would be labeled simply "BEER", and food containers would be labeled "FOOD".
See also
- Kmart realism
- Publicity
- Undercover marketing
- Promotion
- Advertising
- Marketing
- False advertising
- Advertiser funded programming