Product Placement

The 7-up, Doritos, Minute Maid, Tide Terminator 3
By Paul A. Herbig

TV advertising is a $10 Billion a year business. Advertising is what allows us all to watch TV for free (in Great Britain among other countries, you pay a per TV tax of hundreds of dollars annually which goes towards funding commercial free TV). Are we grateful for it? No. For many of us, commercial breaks mean snack breaks, bathroom breaks, or a chance to do a homework problem while waiting for ones favorite show to return. Advertisers’ money is wasted if there is no one around to see their efforts. Their frustration is magnified when a consumer videotapes a show and fast-forward through the commercials. So what are advertisers to do with an increasing sophisticated audience? Don’t give consumers a chance to ignore your advertising, weave it into the show itself so users must see it.

This is called product placement, where an advertiser pays a fee for a product to be shown on a set of a TV show. For commercial TV, this is a rather recent phenomena but it has been used for years and increasing so in movies. The single element that was product placement’s coming of age was the movie, “ET” in 1982 with the prominent placement of Reese’s pieces. Reese’s Pieces sales shot up 65% and it overnight became an household name (note: M&Ms passed up on the opportunity, a chance they are still regretting twenty years later).

Classic examples of product placement in Movies include Ray-Ban sunglasses worn by Tom Cruise in Risky Business and Men in Black. Apple’s Macintosh got wide viewing in the Mission Impossible films (the Mac has been in over 1500 movies and TV shows!). BMW scored a coup when it got James Bond to switch from his beloved Aston Martin to its news Z-3 series. James Dean constant hair combing send Ace comb sales skyrocketing. In “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” the bride’s Greek father uses Windex as a treatment for everything. It can (and has been) overdone when in Tomorrow Never Dies, a 1997 James Bond thriller, had so many product placements the critics deemed it one long-running continuous commercial.

So now the TV networks are working overtime looking for product placement opportunities. If a character must drink a soft drink, how much will 7-up pay or will Coca-Cola ante up for the opportunity to showcase Coke for the entire show? Or must Apple when a yuppie character is slinging around his/her powerbook in solving a mystery? No more shows with “old Tyme Airlines” in an effort of neutrality. Who should we use Delta or American? (In the classic line of “I work for whomever pays me the most, so will the brand who bids the highest be shown the most). Revlon paid millions to be written into critical parts of the soap opera, “All My Children.”

And as you can well imagine, nothing is too extreme for product placement. On the last week’s episode of Survivor in April 2001, the host offered the winner of a reward challenge an online shopping spree using a VISA card which the host named by brand name and held up for cameras to see. Later on an episode of “Will and Grace”, viewers were invited to buy the shirt off of Debra Messing’s back (she wore a Polo shirt which was offered for the low price of $52 on Polo.com—shirt sales then doubled overnight.)(in the future expect to be able to click on a blouse or shirt or pantsuit one of your favorite stars is wearing and you will see a window pop up telling you where you can order it and for how much).

Baseball has taken the art a step further with virtual product placement, the placement of a product or ad where none actually exists. Many baseball games are shot from behind the pitcher’s mound so one can see both the pitcher and batter. One network produced an electronic advertising billboard behind home plate which was soon filled with brands. Players on the field and sports fans in the stadium did not see the ads.

The final step merging advertising and media content was taken by WB Network with a talent show airing in the summer without any commercial breaks; all advertising will be incorporated into the program.

This is point, counter-point. Consumers find a method to minimize advertising through recording of shows and advertisers then proceed to counter it by incorporating the ads into the shows themselves. No doubt there will be an encore to this friendly battle of the airwaves with the consumers creating a way to get around product placement ads and the advertisers working to counter their counter.