Ever wondered if you could hole up in your house, board up the windows and keep from consuming a single marketing message? Just go on an advertising fast from the friendly confines of your couch?
The answer is an emphatic NO. You simply could not, unless you turned off your cable and computer and radio and video console, and sat in total darkness. And wore sunglasses.
Advertising is everywhere, especially in this day and age when marketers are leaving behind traditional avenues in hopes of engaging consumers on turf that encourages audience interaction.
It used to be that you could take a trip out to the cineplex, spend the GDP of Somalia on the way to your seats, and, for the most part, suspend reality for a couple of hours.
Not so much anymore. Watch the following trailers for
Iron Man and
Sex and the City, two of this summer’s biggest movies, and keep your eyes peeled for some subtle and not-so-subtle product encroachment.
Within the first five seconds of each, you almost got run over by an Audi (Iron Man) and supermanned the New York City skyline (Sex and the City). And don’t argue that New York is not a product, because it is. Anything with a world-famous
t-shirt design is a product.
Of course there are tons of product placements throughout the movies that the trailers don’t show, but the fact that the first scene of each trailer is actually a dual purpose ad tells you what the full length movie has in store.
Gone are the days when vehicle emblems were awkwardly removed from car grills, and generic product names stepped in for a name brand gone AWOL. Today’s entertainment is not just entertainment, it’s branded entertainment. And it’s not just at the movies, it’s everywhere.
Ad dollars for video game advertising is projected to reach $1 billion by 2010. That’s huge. And understandably so since 66% of males 18-34 own at least one game console, as do 80% of males 12-17.
When was the last time you saw MTV blur out a clothing brand in a music video or “reality” show? Because artists, reality stars and MTV get paid for product placement, it’s probably been a few years. (But maybe that’s because it’s been a few years since anyone actually watched MTV.)
Our favorite recent use of product placement comes from the people at
Sprint and
Samsung. To push out the Samsung Instinct, Sprint’s new touch-screen answer to the iPhone, Sprint is running a user-generated marketing campaign called
"Sell Out!" The campaign is aptly titled because Sprint will be giving $20 to the first 1,000 people who feature the Instinct in a user-gen video and post it on YouTube.
This is a beautiful idea for three reasons. First, because it’s all user-gen, Sprint isn’t using a superhero to thrust the Instinct in the audience’s face. Instead, the audience chooses to put the product in front of its own face, all while interacting with it. Secondly, Sprint is, in essence, only spending $20k in production on a series of 1,000 spots that will reach millions of people. Lastly, how are people going to get their hands on one of the phones? Either borrow it from a neighbor, or drop a measly (when compared to the iPhone's $$) $130 for their own. As soon as 1,000 people buy the phone, Sprint just made an easy $100k profit - $130k less the $20k for user-gen production.
We’re almost at the end, here, but before we go, we’d like to give you Plink Eye.
Plinking, a term coined and trademarked by product-placement firm
Entertainment Media Works, is the act of embedding a link within user-gen media. Onomatopoeic for the sound a coin makes when it’s dropped into a piggy bank, Plinking gives Joe Schmoe the ability to monetize his YouTube videos. Plink Eye, thus dubbed by Traction, is what you get when you’ve been exposed to Plinking. Plink Eye, though rare, is both viral and communicable.
Traction's advice in this world of branded entertainment: Keep them eyes peeled.