Product Placement in Advertising

Another important driver of this acceleration was the march of technology that allowed consumers to avoid commercials more and more. The remote control has now been followed by the hard disk video-recorder, which in turn has given birth to the ultimate ‘category killer’, Tivo. If people can screen out regular advertising, how do leading brands defend their top of mind position? Answer: They find other ways to keep the brand in front of peoples’ eyeballs.

Marketers preferred to spend their ad budgets on regular advertising while it was a choice. But the choice is disappearing and this is now a game of ‘Survivor’ played out in many product categories.

How Product Placement Works.

Back in 1981, I co-authored a paper in the Journal of Advertising Research on the subtle power of Agenda Setting. This explains much of why product placement works.

Agenda-setting says the media don’t tell us what to think. But they do tell us what to think about! They set the mental agenda. So if something appears frequently in the media, it is raised up on our agenda of things to think about. (Adroit committee chairpersons and politicians claim that if you can control the agenda you can control the meeting.)

This process is subtle and works partly by indicating what’s popular or ‘what’s cool’. Popularity is a magnet. It attracts!

Movies, TV programs, cartoons and pop songs don’t tell us what to think but we infer from them what is popular and what other people think. Each appearance of a leading brand like Coke, Nike or BMW reaffirms its star-status and helps maintain its leadership image. If smaller brands can afford enough ‘payola’ for appearances, they can propel themselves into the limelight and become emerging stars.

A key part of brand development is making your brand more instantly accessible in memory and that’s what product placement does. A person can think of maybe 1-3 brands instantly. But if pressed to continue (as Alba & Hutchinson showed1), a person can dredge many more out of memory. So, when people reach into their memory for a product, just as when they reach for a word, those that come to mind quickly, the ones that are at the top of the mental agenda, have a distinct advantage over those that only emerge after extensive dredging.

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