Audiences build a real emotional connection with their favorite TV shows, movies, and other entertainment content. We each have actors we love, directors we connect with, producers who consistently make the kind of content that speaks to us as individuals. The connection we build is personal, and that’s the reason why product placement can be so effective and so powerful.
However, as marketers, we need to remember that our favorite shows (or movies, or actors, or producers, or directors…) are not necessarily our ideal target audience’s favorite shows.
Aaron Frank, SVP of Strategy, Research, and Insights here at BENlabs explains how BENlabs AI and the deep audience insights it delivers are key to getting brands placed in the right entertainment opportunities to break through with their target audience.
Can You Get My Product Placed in my Favorite Show? Ask BENlabs: Video Transcript
Marketers often start out their journey in product placement by thinking about how they can get their product into their favorite show. And it’s actually one of the biggest challenges that marketers face when they’re new to the field.
They start out with a very small consideration set of shows that they’re thinking about or considering as a good fit for their brand.
And that’s where AI really comes into play and can be really helpful and insightful.
With AI tools like audience mapping, we can begin to understand all of the potential audiences or consumers for a brand, even down to micro communities. And we pair that with analysis on the shows and actors and even the behind the scenes talent like producers or directors so that we can understand who are the biggest fans for those individuals or shows as well.
And by combining those two pieces of analysis together, we can start to uncover shows that we might not have considered before that would be a great fit for a brand… or even how to frame a moment so that it will be of the most interest and have the deepest emotional connection with your potential consumers.
The second piece to it, once we’ve got that list of shows that we think are going to be the right fit and we’ve gotten your brand into them, is how do we measure that effectiveness? And when we started to look into this a year or two ago, what we found is there wasn’t an existing measure of cultural relevance for product placement. So we’ve spent the last year building a new tool that we call the Cultural Relevance Index that takes into factors like reach: are you reaching the right people and the people you care about most. Popularity: if the piece of content breaks through the cultural clutter and really becomes something that was water cooler content that lots of people were watching. And lastly, affinity: did people have a strong emotional connection to that piece of content?
And by looking at all those things, we can truly understand if that show wasn’t just your favorite show, but whether it was the favorite show for all of the people interested in buying your products.
It's Dangerous to go Alone... Take This 🗡️
Don’t go it alone. Tap the BENlabs team and AI tools to make your next campaign smart, scalable, and successful. When you partner with BENlabs, our industry-leading AI will find the best opportunities to integrate your products and services into new and popular productions. Pairing 40+ years of experience and exclusive production relationships, we’ll help your brand more effectively connect with audiences who will love you most.
