now, though, advertising has been obvious, and because of that you had the choice to interact with it or not. Recognizable configurations enabled you to readily distinguish advertising from programming content: TV ads are typically fifteen to thirty seconds in length, and there are only a handful of advertising formats, such as slice of life (Volkswagen’s “Darth Vader” commercial or the Honey Maid “This is wholesome” ad), testimonials (someone endorses the product), or demonstrations (Wisk takes out “ring around the collar”). In print, there is typically a large main visual on the page, a headline, perhaps some body copy, and a “hero shot” of the product. While those traditional ads will continue to exist, they are becoming the exception. They are simply too easy to evade.
So marketers are concealing their messages. Yes, to combat ad avoidance, but that’s not the only reason. As more and more advertising money moves out of television and newspapers and into digital, traditional media have had to come up with ways to replace that significant lost revenue. This has led to more and more advertising of the black ops variety—corporately sponsored content masquerading as news and entertainment.
Serving up those ads are social media, which is best suited to one-to-one, subtle communications rather than advertising that screams at you and begs you to buy a product. Remember: “Social media is for social, not for selling.” Therefore, marketers have evolved from communicating with large undifferentiated masses to communicating with individuals whose behaviors are well known to them because the marketers have been stealthily listening in on their conversations and tracking their every digital move. Of particular interest to marketers are the demographic known as Millennials, because they have so willingly embraced these social spaces.
In this chapter, we will look at the progressive encroaching of advertising messages into media content. Product placement, also known as branded entertainment or more broadly as advertainment, has a long history in film and television.6 Now, as this practice transitions into online spaces, it becomes far less recognizable.
FROM PRODUCT PLACEMENT TO IMMERSIVE SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
Product placement occurs when companies pay to have their brand included in media content, historically in movies and television shows, and today also in video games, music videos, and most forms of digital content. The technique has been used in film since the 1890s, but became broad standard practice after Reese’s Pieces appeared in Steven Spielberg’s E.T., leading to a 66 percent increase in sales of the candy.7 Since then, we have seen movies jammed full of products, from the James Bond series of movies (which are famous for having dozens of product tie-ins) to Wayne’s World to The Lego Movie, which is in essence a two-hour commercial for a children’s product, but which also found space to include family-friendly products from companies like Apple, DC Comics, the NBA, and Lucasfilm, among others. Morgan Spurlock, a documentarian famous for making Super Size Me, produced a documentary called The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, a film completely financed by product placement. (He also produced a film called Mansome about male grooming, which he claimed was independent. Later he admitted the film had corporate support after reviewers speculated that it had been underwritten by Gillette—a prime example of content confusion.) As film production costs increased to an average of $100 million, product placement became a go-to method to offset those expenses, either through payment by the product sponsor or through in-kind donations, such as Apple providing free iPhones and Airbooks to decorate a set.
On television, Survivor is typically noted as one of the first programs to propel the use of product placement in recent decades. Producer Mark Burnett had no choice: he wanted to get the show on the air, and CBS would only accept it if he could bring advertisers on board with him. At the time, CBS was struggling in the ratings and having a hard time getting advertisers for their traditional scripted programming. How were they going to sell an advertiser on an untested reality series, a format that was virtually unheard of at the time? Burnett took the network up on their offer and integrated a number of popular consumer brands into the program. Contestants who hadn’t brushed their teeth in weeks would be given a challenge where the prize was a basket of Crest mouthwash, for which they were exceedingly grateful, or contestants won Doritos and Mountain Dew, which seemed like ambrosia after eating bugs or twigs or whatever else they could forage in the wilds of some exotic island.
Survivor was just the beginning. The show premiered in 2000, a year after TiVo was introduced. TiVo—and more broadly, digital video recorders—were slow to gain acceptance. By 2007, they were still in only 17 percent of U.S. households. Even so, television networks were concerned about what this technology might do to their business of getting eyeballs in front of advertising, because viewers could easily skip over commercials. While people had been able to do this using VCRs, DVRs simplified the recording process in a way that VCRs never could. Today, DVRs are in 48 percent of U.S. households. On the plus side for marketers, people who use DVRs watch more television; the downside is that they’re less likely to watch the accompanying advertising, as 60 percent of DVR users skip commercials.8 So if people are watching more TV but viewing fewer ads, the answer was obvious: put the product into the show itself.9
Product placement is now rampant. Global spending reached more than $10.5 billion in 2014, which was up 13.6 percent from the previous year.10 Modern Family plugs Prius and iPads, The Walking Dead pushes Hyundai, and 30 Rock shamelessly plugged everything from Verizon to Snapple, but does so with tongue-in-cheek. And who can forget the moment when Oprah Winfrey gave away cars—Pontiac G6s—to everyone in her audience, saying, “You get a car and you get a car and you get a car”? Somehow this seemed less offensive because every car recipient was presented as so deserving. Even online-only programs like Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards have bought into this, with the latter being so besieged with brand endorsements that the LA Times dubbed the show the “house of product placement.”11
Most blatant are reality series, particularly contest-based programs. Starbucks cups sit in the armrests of the judges’ chairs on The Voice, and Coke adorns the set of American Idol, whose contestants help to create Ford commercials: the making of these ads becomes a lengthy segment of the show. After American Idol, the biggest winner is The Biggest Loser, which has more than five hundred product occurrences per season. At approximately eighteen episodes per season, that equals thirty product mentions or product appearances per show.
To get an idea not only of how pervasive but of how embedded and subtle this has become, try this exercise I use with my students: watch one of the two-hour morning news programs and count how many times a product is being pitched to you. Do not count the commercials or the traditional marketing tools like billboards that say “This segment brought to you by Smuckers,” but rather the less blatant forms of promotion. Is CBS doing a story about football because it is a news story, or because they have the rights to the NFL? And while you are at it, are they taking a less critical view of what is going on in the league than other news outlets? Is the athlete on “Good Morning America” talking about her sport, or about her new clothing line? If you do this sort of content analysis, you will find that very little of what appears on morning “news” contains anything of the sort.
Beyond building simple brand awareness in a way that’s less intrusive and more economical than traditional advertising, marketers have good reason to use product placement.12 Most people now watch television with another device present: 84 percent of Americans use mobile phones as a second screen while watching TV.13 We may be checking email or posting to Facebook, but we also buy products: “Seventeen percent of consumers use secondary devices to purchase products featured on the programs they watch.”14
But isn’t this just like a commercial? Don’t we know we’re being pitched when we see the Coke can on the table or the lingering close-up on the car logo? Well, yes and no. Part of the reason why product placement is effective is that we tend to approach entertainment differently than we do advertising. Advertising is biased, so we look at it with our critical wits intact. Not so with entertainment. With product placement—and with all advertising to some extent—we don’t have to consciously remember the product in order for it to influence our attitude toward the brand.