Copyright 2002
Magazine: Media
Topic: Product Placement
Byline: Scott Hays
Everybody’s doing it. Visa, Polo,
Amstel Light, Baskin-Robbins, Hostess,
Bacardi, Kraft Foods, the American Heart
Association, Campbell Soup Company, Hallmark,
Mercedes-Benz, Gateway Computers, Burger
King, Doritos, BMW, Laurent-Perrier Champagne,
Coffee Beanery, and the Office of National
Drug Control Policy. Yes, all of those
brands have participated in product placement
deals in recent years.
And now there’s Revlon
The cosmetics maker paid ABC a reported
"several million dollars" to
be featured for 13 weeks in the daytime
serial All My Children. The plot
evidently went something like this: Susan
Lucci’s character, Erica Kane, who
owns a cosmetics company, Enchantment,
engaged in a corporate battle with Revlon
after the real-life cosmetics company
tried to "hire away one of her top
employees."
In what can only be described as the
biggest TV story line tie-in to date,
Revlon was also given exclusive rights
to advertise its cosmetics products during
the show’s commercial time. While
the arrangement has made headlines, what
you may well want to know is how the whole
thing came together, for the next time
your client’s brand wants to be
a featured guest star on Everyone
Loves Raymond.
However, if advertisers want more exposure,
this deal didn’t come around because
of that craving. The storyline originated
with the All My Children writers,
who informed ABC’s sales executives,
who quickly reached a deal with Revlon,
says aW0ggela Shapiro, president of ABC
Daytime. "Instead of creating a fictitious
cosmetics company, we thought it might
be fun for the audience if we used a real-life
company as part of the storyline,"
she says. "It was a win for Revlon
because it received extraordinary exposure,
and it was a win for ABC because it brought
in incremental revenue."
With the ever-increasing fusion of television
and advertising, and the advent of TiVo
and other services that make it easier
for viewers to skip commercials, advertisers
and television networks are looking for
new ways to generate ad revenue in a tight
market.
Of course, product placement deals on
TV and in the movies are nothing new.
In fact, there have been several celebrated
deals that have received unprecedented
marketing exposure. Remember when M&M/Mars
turned down director Steven Spielberg's
request for permission to use M&Ms
in E.T.? Spielberg turned to Reese’s
Pieces, owned by Mars rival Hershey Foods.
Remember when BMW launched its Z2 roadster
by featuring the car in the 1996 James
Bond flick GoldenEye? The deal
generated hundreds of millions of dollars
of exposure. BMW reportedly paid $3 million,
and industry sources estimate that the
placement sold $240 million in cars in
advance sales alone.
But it’s worth wondering what advertisers
get out of these deals besides the opportunity
to be sprinkled with a little stardust.
If the advertiser is looking to get true
bang for the buck, its goal is to achieve
an integrated form of advertising by showing
its products in a seemingly non-commercial
context. Although a company might pay
millions of dollars for a straightforward
placement, the deals are usually more
complicated. Often, product placements
are part of a larger marketing tie-in,
in which a company agrees to create an
ad campaign, a sweepstakes, or some other
promotional campaign that complements
the studio’s own marketing efforts
for the film.
What makes a good product placement
deal?
"First and foremost, you must have
your audience in mind," says ABC’s
Shapiro. "If you do something that’s
wrong for the audience, ultimately you
lose that audience, ratings go down, and
the advertiser’s not happy."
And, adds Shapiro, you can’t jeopardize
the integrity of either the programming
or the advertiser. "If I jeopardize
the integrity of our own brand, my audience
is going to be the first to let me know.
If I enter a deal with an advertiser that
dilutes their brand, that’s shortsighted
on my part. The execution is often harder
than one might imagine."
In the ABC-Revlon deal, ABC’s daytime
executives met with Revlon and its agency,
New York–based Deutsch, Inc., to
get to know each other’s business.
Although Revlon could not dictate how
the story line was structured, the All
My Children writers were clearly
sensitive to not portraying the cosmetics
company in a negative light.
"The value of the deal is in what
happens in the plot," says Peter
Gardiner, partner/chief media officer
for Deutsch, Inc. Because this particular
deal was organically grown by the writers,
we just thought it was a natural fit for
Revlon."
And how did Revlon go about measuring
the brand impact of such a deal? "We
don’t have that completely figured
out," admits Gardiner. "But
you’ve got to weigh the intangibles.
How valuable is the story line to your
brand? We’re doing our best to track
the mentions within the show, and the
PR we received was extraordinary. But
there’s no formula for this stuff,
at least not yet."
Jay May is president of the Los Angeles–based
product placement agency Feature This!
Some of the product deals he has structured
include putting Popeye's Chicken in front
of Adam Sandler in Little Nicky
and a cup of Coffee Beanery coffee in
Julia Roberts’s hand in a poster
for the movie Erin Brockovich.
He says there are several ways an advertiser
can broker a product placement deal:
- The product is already scripted in
the movie ("He reaches for a can
of SPAM");
- The producers decide early in the
script-development phase to start looking
for product placement ideas; or
- The advertiser agrees to pony up
a marketing program that helps the producers
sell movie tickets or draw viewers.
In the end, May suggests, there are three
basic reasons why advertisers choose to
underwrite a product placement deal: to
sell product, to generate what he calls
"feel-good" appeal for viewers/consumers
who own or purchase the advertised product
("That’s my car James Bond
drove in GoldenEye"), and
to engender "feel-good" appeal
for the advertiser and its employees ("Did
you see my company on TV last night?").
And what does a company like ABC get
out of the deal? "Ultimately, product
placement deals serve the advertiser and
its consumers as well as our viewers and
their consumers," says Shapiro. "It’s
rare that you’ll discover an opportunity
that serves all the gods. For two strong
brands to be associated with each other
in a positive context is a great growth
opportunity for everyone."
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