Placement marketing is not a new thing. Product placement in books, movies and other venues started back in 1873, when the transport and shipping companies began to lobby to have their names placed in the novel, Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. You will find that since that time, product placement in novels has been a popular method for companies who are trying to develop their name or image.
Placement marketing is often created by having someone of some measure of fame hold the product being marketed in their hands in a photograph. If the item is too large to be held, then just having it in the same photo as the famous individual will often cause people to start to notice the product on the store shelves.
The first film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture was Wings, in 1927. This film participated in placement marketing by having Hershey’s chocolate predominant in a scene so that people would see it.
Later, in 1931, Wrigley’s PK Chewing Gum was placed in the film M, by Fritz Lang. In the film you see a banner over a staircase and the banner is an advertisement for Wrigley’s PK Chewing Gum. The visual image of the banner remained on the screen for almost thirty seconds.
The Life Savers candy got a prominent product placement in Horse Feathers in 1932. In the film, the character played by Thelma Todd falls out of a canoe. She calls for help asking someone to throw her a lifesaver. Groucho Marx’s character is seen throwing her a piece of Life Savers candy.
Advertisers have used many different methods to try to ascertain whether the placement marketing works or not. One of the methods of checking to see if product placement work is to show a group of individuals, the show that contains images of certain products. After they have seen the show, the individuals are offered the product that was placed in the show and an alternative product that was not seen in the film. The idea is to see how many people choose the product they were just exposed to in the film they viewed.
That type of testing is called implicit memory tests. Nine times out of ten if a person see images of a particular brand of soda in a television program, then immediately after the program they are offered soda, they will choose the brand they saw. Product placement is very powerful and seems to work on our subconscious minds.
Explicit memory is checked after people view a film as well. To determine how many products the people saw, recognized and remember being in the film they just viewed, the testers hand the participants a sheet of paper with the names of different products on them. The participant is supposed to circle the names of all of the product placements they remember from the movie they just saw.
The economic effects that product placement has on the economy are researched heavily. The findings of the majority of this research work is that when a company places a product in an upcoming box office movie, they will see an increase in the sales of their product for a period of time. The upswing in sales will generally begin about ten days prior to the release of the movie and will last about three weeks after the movie has been debuted.
If you recall the television series called Laverne and Shirley you will remember that Laverne often drank Pepsi and milk. This product placement caused many young people to buy Pepsi cola, so they could try the drink advertised on the show. Very clever of Pepsi to use their product in this way.
When you watch a movie or a television program that you like you will notice that the characters in the show tend to drive a certain type of vehicle. They will drive a particular brand of vehicle and the brand will be prominently displayed so that everyone knows what type of vehicle the character prefers. In the movie Smokey and the Bandit, the character that was played by Burt Reynolds drove a Trans-am. People that watched the movie and identified heavily with this character often purchased these cars, so they could emulate their hero. Product placement of this type helps people to associate a particular vehicle or soft drink with a film star they wish to be like.
In Magnum PI, the main character drives a red Ferrari. He is portrayed by Tom Selleck and at that time, Tom Selleck was one of the biggest sex symbols in the movie industry. Men wanted to emulate Tom Selleck because women found him alluring and attractive. The sales of Ferraris rose dramatically during the first two years that the program aired on television.
For product placement to achieve the desired effect, the product must be seen by an audience that is going to identify with the characters in the program. If the target audience is not reached with the product placement, then the advertising of the item on the movie will have no effect on the sales of the product in question. Proper product placement marketing will be sure that the product that is being advertised is going to be seen by individuals that will likely relate heavily to the main characters of the show.
When a company takes out advertising air time on a radio station, they try their best to buy a time slot when the average listener will be the right age to respond to their ad. Advertisers trying to peddle adult diapers will not want to buy air time when the main audience is under the age of twenty five and the sports drink companies do not want to buy air time when the main audience is going to be elderly people. When you place your ad on the air is just as important as where you place your product in a show.
If you are a magazine company you want popular television characters to be seen reading your magazine. The target audience will relate to the character they see on television and they will want to read the same magazines that the television character reads. This type of product placement is subtle and it works on the subconscious mind of the watcher.
If you hear the name of a political candidate often enough you will start to feel familiar with that candidate. You may not know what grounds the candidate is running on or what their track record is, but you will know that the name is familiar to you. You are more likely to vote for the political candidate whose name seems familiar to you.
When you hear a name brand menti8on frequently in films, television and on radio shows, you start to remember that product. When you go to the grocery store to purchase items, you will automatically choose the items that seem familiar to you. You will buy things you know to work, things you have seen in the homes of friends and relatives and things that you have heard the name of so often that you think you know the product. This type of product placement works on our subconscious minds and although we cannot truly control what our subconscious mind does or thinks, we can inundate other people with brand names and manipulate their subconscious.
In order to market an item you have to draw attention to that item. The more people you get to notice the item, the better chance you have of selling it. You want people to see your item on the shelves of every store they enter. You want those items to be prominently displayed and not hidden on the bottom shelf. In a store, the best place to have a product situated is on the shelf that is an eye level with a person of average height. If the product is on shelves that are lower than the eye level the person will not likely see them unless they are looking specifically for them. The same thing can be said for products that are on the upper shelves. People may not see them unless they are specifically looking for them.
In a television show you want the main character to be the one that uses your product. The main character is the person that the largest numbers of audience members identify with. If the main character uses a particular brand of toothpaste, then it is likely that the viewers will also want to use this toothpaste. Ostanding sells custom shades and they might want the main character to be seen standing in front of one of their shades.
You also want your product to be used more frequently by characters that are thought of as “good” characters. People do not usually relate to the evil characters or the bad guys in a movie. Sometimes the “bad” guys are actually the “good” guys. You need to be familiar with the chow that you are putting the product into so you can determine which characters are going to get you an increase in sales and which ones are going to get you a decrease in sales.
You must select the characters that the audience is supposed to relate to. In Sons of Anarchy, the show revolves around a motorcycle gang and they are not always doing good things. They are well developed characters that the audience falls in love with. People want to look like their favorite Sons of Anarchy characters. They try to dress like them, talk like them and they use the products the characters are seen using.
You want to research the show and decide which characters the audience is going to like the most. If you cannot afford to place your product in the hands of the main character, then try for a supporting actor that has the ability to have great appeal to the audience. If you are watching a show like Glee, they are several different characters that can be used to promote your products and each character has their own unique set of fans.
Some people make a game out of watching television shows or movies and trying to spot all of the different brands that are advertised during the show. This can be quite entertaining. No movie is going to have someone walking around carrying a box of Cheerios cereal all day, but when the scene calls for the actors to be eating breakfast, you may see them pass a box of the cereal around to each family member or you might simply see the cereal sitting on the counter in the background. When you see the box of cereal on the table being passed around by the characters, the company that produces the product paid more for the time in the film than when you simply see the box sitting on the cabinet in the background.
The next time you are watching a movie, try to count the many different times you see name brand products in the scenes. The makers of these products pay the producers of the show to place their products in the scenes. This money helps to finance the making of the movie. The movie producer’s gain and the company get advertisements for their products.
A picture is said to have the power to paint a thousand words. That means that one visual image can be as powerful as one thousand descriptive words. Seeing a product in a show for twenty seconds is as powerful, if not more powerful than watching a sixty second advertisement for the item. Product placement in a movie is carefully thought out by the company selling the item and by the movie producer so that the product blends in well with what is happening in the scene, and is obvious enough that everyone will see and recognize it.
Have you ever noticed that some of the products you see in the movies are not immediately recognizable to you as products, but they are just as effective at creating a desire for a certain item. Think about watching a movie that has a large window covered by a Roman shade. Now picture that Roman shade as being very decorative and unique. You may have the desire built inside you to go out and order Roman shades with custom designed fabrics on them from Ostanding so that you can have the same look on your windows.
You know that when you see furniture groupings in movies you are likely to purchase furniture that looks like the stuff you saw on your favorite show. When different styles of furniture become popular, they are often made that way because a set designer created a special look for a movie using that type of furniture. We tend to copy the things we see that we think are attractive such as furniture that we find attractive.
There are a large number of times you will see people in movies drinking from cans that simply say soda on them. This is usually due to the fact that no company thought the film would be popular enough for them to invest their money in. When you see these generic cans on shows that have become blockbusters it will make you laugh at the soda companies that missed the opportunity to get some good advertising in.
You see product placement ads on the sides of buses as they travel through the city streets. Every time you see one of the buses the advertisement is branded into your memory and you become more familiar with the name of the product and you are more likely to buy the product.
The same type of advertising is used in little league parks around the country. Different businesses donate their time, services and money to the little league industry and to repay these businesses an advertisement about them is placed around the fence of the playing field. Parents who attend the game see the advertisements and they are more likely to shop at those stores because they donated to their child’s sporting team.
Athletes use corporate sponsors to pay for their activities. In return, they place the name of their contributor’s products on their sporting gear like their race car or their helmets that they wear. People see the athlete wearing the emblem of certain products and it causes them to want to buy those products as well.
It does not matter if you make custom blinds like Ostanding, or food products, home furnishings or magazines, you can greatly benefit from proper product placement. When you establish your brand name in association with a movie that people like or a television program that draws huge audiences, then you are creating twice the number of people that will be interested in your product.
Being a successful business person means being able to get your name out to the people and have them recognize you. It also means using every method at your disposal to get your name out to those people. It means working on advertising your goods just as hard as you work to make them. It means changing with the times and being flexible.
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