RECENT PRESS COVERAGE FOR OUR AGENCY
Hollywood Branded agency CEO Stacy Jones is interviewed by BrandChannel, a Webby Award-winning website about all things branding, regarding Nielsen's recent product placement study.
Read the article US TV Product Placement Boosts Brands, Even as It’s Shrinking which discusses Nielsen's recent research that finds that product placement and branded integrations are declining on US TV, even while in-program placement boosts brand awareness.
In this post, we look at what our CEO says is the reasoning behind Nielsen's stated findings.
What This Means
As excerpted from the article, reasons for the findings likely include:
1. Quality of quantity
Many brands are looking for ‘bigger’ opportunities that they can wrap a campaign around and add social media traction to it, even if that campaign is only for a couple of weeks,
2. Dominance of product placement may have been overstated.
Years of reports about product placement rushing in to buoy the collapsing US TV advertising paradigm has led production executives to think that the golden chalice to fund their production will be a major brand integration deal. And many TV execs believe every brand should come with dollars attached.
3. Massive opportunities for brand partnerships direct away from TV
What we are seeing as an agency are more opportunities for brand partnerships on more platforms. And whether that be trade and loan of product, or fees, there is a limit of product and cash to go around. Even a decade ago, one of our brand clients may have judged a show’s opportunity by overall reach and only wanted to work with network television, which at the time guaranteed the largest footprint. Today, we often take a more specific look at the niche reach and relevancy to the brand. As SVOD (subscription video on demand) and digital opportunities become more abundant, the pool of properties one can work with becomes gigantic.
4. Networks restrict certain opportunities only to brands committed to a larger conventional ad buy.
Even when brands themselves have interest in exploring [product placement] opportunities, the networks are requesting that they deal directly with their media agencies to go through a vetting process of ensuring that the ad dollar allocation is there before having conversations. This is literally closing the door to brands who prefer to reverse-engineer, and have dollars, are interested in overall ideas, and may then choose to grow the idea with ad dollars attached. So down go the numbers seen on network TV of product placement. And we can’t tell you how many brands we have worked with that prefer to look at the opportunity first, build legs around it on and off screen, and then add additional advertising dollars to the equation to further support. There are certain networks we will call to discuss what we and our brand client thinks may be a brilliant idea, and the conversation is immediately shut down based on, ‘let us have the network ad team assigned to that brand’s agency do a cost basis history of ad spending and then we will see if we can talk.’ It happens frequently.
So How Can Brands Step Up Their Product Placement Campaigns?
Is Product Placement right for your brand? Watch this video to learn more about how this marketing practice works, what brand categories it works for, and the results brand marketers see! And how to leverage and take this marketing practice to it's next level!
Also, check out some of Hollywood Branded's other blogs to learn more about product placement!
- Product Placement Versus Brand Integration Explained
- 5 Music Video Product Placement Case Studies [Infographic]
- Toy Story Effect: How Film's Product Placement Increased Sales Of Toys
- How To Secure Product Placement With A Production
- 3 Reasons Why Productions Use Product Placement
