Supercharge your advertising with Product Placement
Ad skipping and ad avoidance are at an all-time high, causing brands and marketers to find new ways to reach their desired audiences. Product placement is an effective addition to traditional advertising and can help boost brand recognition.
Also known as brand integration, product placement utilizes entertainment as a marketing channel by seamlessly placing products in movies, TV shows, music videos, and more. Product placement is about “being there” when it matters most. Brand integrations drive brand affinity and ensure your products are unskippable across entertainment, even on ad-supported channels.
“Marketers understand the benefits that both traditional ads and product placement efforts can deliver individually. But instead of viewing them as competitors or separate strategies, marketers and brands should recognize the opportunity at hand to drive further impact by pairing the two strategies together. If you want to increase your ad effectiveness, product placement is the solution. With product placement’s ability to authentically connect a brand with its target audience while reaching both ad-supported and non-ad-supported audiences simultaneously, it’s the cost-effective solution to driving greater impact at scale for your brand.”
— Erin Schmidt, BEN Chief Product Placement Officer
Although product placement campaigns are becoming more popular among marketers these days – and are revolutionizing the advertising industry – brand integrations aren’t here to snatch the spotlight away from traditional advertising methods. Instead, product placement can enhance, elevate, and captivate audiences in ways traditional ads simply can’t. When utilized effectively, brand integrations can supercharge your ad efforts and drive impactful measurable results, taking your brand to new heights.
How does Product Placement fill in the gaps?
While audiences’ thirst for content continues to grow, a shifting and evolving media landscape has set new norms and expectations amongst viewers. Thus, it is crucial that product placement and traditional advertising strategies are both present in a brand’s marketing mix. Here is why product placement could be your best ally in taking your advertising efforts to the next level:
1. Product placement is unskippable and unblockable.
With ad avoidance on the rise, 85% of households with a yearly income of $120K or higher are willing to pay for ways to avoid ads. Additionally, 66% of consumers say they’d rather see product placement in content than in separate ads. Considering these audiences’ new preferences, it becomes difficult for brands to measure their effectiveness in reaching consumers relying only on traditional advertising channels.
2. Product placement allows advertisers to reach a wider audience over time.
Brand integrations increase brand awareness and drive impact across brand KPIs indefinitely. Once content is released, it’ll garner new impressions month after month, ultimately providing a stronger value than traditional ad spend. In as quickly as 90 days, a product placement campaign’s CPM can significantly outperform a traditional ad’s CPM when factoring in the cumulative impressions the brand integration will amass over time.
3. Product placement aligns with culturally relevant titles and talent.
Product placement leverages the power of storytelling. How is this accomplished? By connecting a brand with the story’s emotions to organically reach the target consumer. By strategically placing products in culturally significant content, advertisers can tap into the emotional connection viewers have with these narratives. The effective use of relevant content ultimately creates a deeper resonance and association with the brand.
Frito-Lay, one of the most powerful snack brands, sought to maintain relevance with younger audiences by integrating many of their products into popular content – including music videos. Ten of these integrations reached Netflix’s Top 10 List and 85% of the campaign impressions were garnered on non-ad-supported content. As a result, Frito-Lay successfully engaged diverse and multicultural audiences, delivering 20% over contract projections.
Integrations + Traditional Ads
Too good to be true? A recent attribution study has shown that integrations and traditional ads can yield a higher impact when implemented together. The study included two different brand categories, one CPG brand interested in driving sales, and a financial services brand looking to drive website visits. Both of the brands integrated across popular CW series, such as Charmed and Riverdale. Each brand exposed an audience group to both their brand integration within the content and one of their traditional 30-second ad spots. Additionally, they exposed a second audience to their same 30-second ad spot only. The results showed an integration paired with an ad drove significant lift for the brands compared to an ad alone. Using both product placement and traditional advertising through omnichannel efforts is a proven strategy to not just gain higher awareness but also drive actionable results amongst audiences.
With this in mind, by strategically incorporating product placement alongside traditional advertising, brands can maximize their reach and effectiveness, creating powerful advertising campaigns. Audiences are consuming content at an all time high, but so are the opportunities for distractions. Brands leveraging various content strategies to engage with target audiences can trust product placement as a proven method to reach audiences in both ad-supported and non-supported content. Now is the time to start creating a 360-degree presence amongst audiences in and around the content.
