{"id":65914,"date":"2022-04-11T18:18:54","date_gmt":"2022-04-11T18:18:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/?p=65914"},"modified":"2022-04-11T18:18:54","modified_gmt":"2022-04-11T18:18:54","slug":"product-placement-101","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/blog\/product-placement-101\/","title":{"rendered":"Product Placement 101"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pqf-WVgoq9E?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe>This is a blog about product placement in movies, TV shows and commercials. It&#8217;s a discussion about the art of product placement and the money involved in it.<\/p>\n<p>Product placement has been around for many, many years now. Most of us have seen it in movies, television shows and commercials but we don&#8217;t really notice it anymore. But sometimes it really sticks out and is really obvious to the point where you end up wondering why they decided to place that particular product at that particular time in this particular scene.<\/p>\n<p>But what is product placement? Product placement is when a company places one of their products in an entertainment medium such as a movie, television show or commercial with the hope that they will get noticed by the viewers. The question is: how do they do this? How do they decide which product to use and where to place it?<\/p>\n<p>As you can imagine there are many companies who want to be included in these entertainment forms but there are only so many slots available. So how do they decide who gets what slot? Well there are several ways:<\/p>\n<p>Firstly, some companies pay for the right to use their product in a film or television show or commercial (called &#8220;pay-to-play&#8221;). Sometimes they pay big bucks for this right while other times they could negotiate<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve all seen it in the movies: if a character is drinking a certain brand of soda, chances are that the billboard for that soda will appear in the background of an establishing shot.<\/p>\n<p>This phenomenon, known as product placement, has been around for over a century. It has become so ubiquitous that we tend to take it for granted, but it is actually very effective. It does more than just provide a bit of extra funding for your favorite film; it also subtly shapes the way you think about certain brands.<\/p>\n<p>Product placement works because it exploits one of our most basic psychological tendencies: association. When we see a product placed in a movie or on TV, we automatically associate it with the film or show we&#8217;re watching. And when we see the product again in real life, this association may cause us to think favorably of the brand in question.<\/p>\n<p>This effect has been tested experimentally many times; most famously, an experiment conducted in 1978 found that moviegoers who saw popcorn being served during a movie rated popcorn more favorably than those who did not.<\/p>\n<p>And yet product placement still seems like something of a black art to many people. Many producers and directors treat placement almost as an afterthought: if they can&#8217;t get money from some other source, they&#8217;ll put<\/p>\n<p>As a very general rule, product-placement marketers have learned that the best way to make a commercial memorable is to find the right balance between entertainment and information.<\/p>\n<p>The point of product placement is to provide &#8220;third-party&#8221; endorsement of the product. The message should tell the audience something they don&#8217;t know about the product &#8211; and probably never would have thought of on their own. It shouldn&#8217;t be an obvious selling point.<\/p>\n<p>A well-placed mention of a brand may also subtly change how an audience views a character or feels about a scene. For example, if you show a guy who&#8217;s supposed to be cool driving a car with a certain logo on it, it can help make him seem cooler &#8211; even if he&#8217;s just as obnoxious in real life as any other driver.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Product Placement&#8221; is the catch-all term for placing a product into a movie or TV show. Often, it&#8217;s an entire line of products. For example, the script calls for someone to drink Dr. Pepper while driving a Ford Focus.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a tough sell to get clients on board with this idea. They ask, &#8220;Why would I pay all that money just to put my product in someone else&#8217;s movie?&#8221; The answer is usually because you can&#8217;t afford to buy your own TV show!<\/p>\n<p>Product placement has come a long way since it first began. Before there was product placement, all that could be done was simply displaying the product on camera during filming. This was seen as something of a risky venture, as it wasn&#8217;t always clear if the brand would be exposed on camera or how many people would see it once the film was finished and ready to air. There were also questions about whether these brands would be considered sponsorships or paid advertising, which can have legal implications for broadcast networks and film producers alike.<\/p>\n<p>The first big breakthrough came from producer Merv Griffin, who introduced the idea of cross-product marketing in 1971 for his hit game show, Wheel of Fortune. Griffin had convinced Coca-Cola to sponsor his show by using their products<\/p>\n<p>Movie producers and marketers are in constant search of new ways to make products and brands &#8220;cool&#8221; or &#8220;hip&#8221; enough to appear in their films. Commercials, especially for cars, trucks, beer and liquor have long sought the same thing. And TV shows have even longer been under pressure to find commercial sponsors in order to stay on the air.<\/p>\n<p>Who better than famous directors and writers could help them achieve this?<\/p>\n<p>Not all directors like this idea. Orson Welles told a reporter in 1983: &#8220;I hate commercials. I think that a man should create art for the sake of art.&#8221; But most others are happy to be paid for their talents by product placement companies, who pay them a lot of money in exchange for using their films to advertise products. If a director has a film coming out, or is about to begin pre-production on a new film project, he or she has an obvious motive to line up some product placement deals before it begins production.<\/p>\n<p>Lt. Columbo was a special case of product placement. Universal had bought the rights to the character from author Geroge Wambaugh for $10,000 cash and $40,000 worth of Universal movie tickets (which they kept giving away as prizes on game shows). In return,<\/p>\n<p>Product placement is a marketing strategy where companies pay to have their products or brands placed in certain media. The practice is common in sports and entertainment programming, particularly television programs and films, also in video games and music videos.<\/p>\n<p>Although it has existed in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century, it was not widely used until after World War II. By the 1990s, product placement was ubiquitous in movies, television shows and music videos.<\/p>\n<p>Product placement began to be critiqued as an effective marketing strategy by the mid-2000s. This is due to a number of factors, including its growing perception as being &#8220;disruptive of the viewing experience&#8221; and its potential for &#8220;subliminal manipulation&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The organization responsible for monitoring brand appearances in movies, TV shows and music videos is called Nielsen IAG (formerly known as Nielsen Media Research).<\/p>\n<p>When I was younger, I used to think that if I wanted to be a &#8220;professional&#8221; writer, it would mean that I could write for money.<\/p>\n<p>But now I understand that being a commercial artist is more than just doing something you get paid for. It&#8217;s also about doing work you feel passionate about.<\/p>\n<p>Being professional means doing work you are proud of, and that work can happen to be commercial or non-commercial. And the best way to do commercial work is to start selling non-commercial work first.*<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/cME6GQKTMl8?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TR_DEFhpJU4?autoplay=1&#038;mute=1\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a blog about product placement in movies, TV shows and commercials. It&#8217;s a discussion about the art of product placement and the money involved in it. Product placement has been around for many, many years now. Most of us have seen it in movies, television shows and commercials but we don&#8217;t really notice [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65914"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65914"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65916,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65914\/revisions\/65916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artspainter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}