Not your father’s product promotion
The trouble is that the huge success of product placement is causing a dip in its credibility and effectiveness as a marketing channel. Audiences are increasingly skeptical.
— Harvard Business Review
Everyone loves a story . . . which is why marketers have been piggybacking on them for so long.
Product placement began to appear in movies almost as soon as they became a medium — but there’s no doubt it has proliferated in the past couple of decades. We’re accustomed to green screens in sports and billboards in video games. Marketers are even going back and “retroactively” adding product placement to existing music videos.
Audiences quickly learned to tune out the ads, though, and so an arms race began. We turned to videocassettes and later DVRs — with their ad-skipping functions — and recently ad-blockers within browsers.
Now, it’s to the point that we almost notice when we don’t see brands in stories. One of the things that defined William Gibson’s breakthrough 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer, for example, was his use of brands, both real and imagined, to create a sense of realism. Quentin Tarantino includes the same fictitious brand of cigarettes in many of his movies for much the same reason — because we now notice when branding is “missing” from scenes.
Paid placement of products, though, is very hard to do well. We all notice when movies seem stuffed with conspicuous logos or the main character seems fixated on certain products. (How many movies have characters who all use the same Samsung phone or drive the same Audi?)
A recent Harvard Business Review article explores the symptoms of this fatigue:
The trouble is that the huge success of product placement is causing a dip in its credibility and effectiveness as a marketing channel. Audiences are increasingly skeptical. Research by Eva A. van Reijmersdal of the University of Amsterdam suggests that when product placement becomes too prominent, it affects attitudes negatively because viewers become aware of a deliberate selling attempt. Product placement can also lower audiences’ evaluations of the focal entertainment product (the film or the show), as recently demonstrated by Andre Marchand and colleagues. And it’s particularly true when audiences like the film or show.
Perhaps that’s why marketers are now striking out in entirely new and creative directions. The image accompanying this post was one early example featuring future President Reagan hosting an anthology series called The General Electric Theater. Now GE is pushing the envelope again by producing its own science-fiction podcast, which has been an enormous success:
Its eight-part science-fiction thriller “The Message,” produced with the Panoply podcasting network, hit №1 on the iTunes podcast chart and had nearly five million downloads. Now comes “LifeAfter,” a futuristic 10-episode drama, the first installment of which was released this month. It tells the story of a low-level worker at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is obsessed with the traces of life his dead wife left behind on social media, particularly a fictional audio service. The first episode kicks off with what sounds like an ad for that service — but perhaps that’s a wink of sorts. As with “The Message,” a notable detail in this branding experiment is that the sponsoring brand is, by design, almost never mentioned.
It takes courage to use this approach. But, if you lack courage, turn on your common sense. If you don’t have common sense then I bolded the last nine words. Re-read it ten trillion times. It will sink in.
Audiences, I promise you, will reward you when you deliver entertainment and creativity without a “hard sell.”
GE isn’t the only blue chip to get it. Microsoft similarly got creative with “Future Visions,” in which some of the world’s top science-fiction writers, including Elizabeth Bear, Greg Bear, David Brin and Ann Leckie, and graphic novelist Blue Delliquanti were invited to visit one of Microsoft Research’s 55 departments, learn there, and follow their curiosity, producing fiction from their experiences.
Among the many topics they absorbed were quantum computing, prediction analytics, virtual teleportation and computing that relates to emotion. The writers talked to researchers in person, asked questions and had candid conversations during packed, curated visits in the spring, aligned to their interests.
The stories were collected and published as a book and a graphic novel whose only branding was the umbrella under which they were organized.
Even scientists are trying the use of original fiction, in this case in an effort to teach the world about climate science:
Andrew Merrie, a sustainability scientist at the Stockholm University’s Resilience Centre, thinks science fiction can succeed in attracting attention where scientific papers have failed. “There’s no easy entry point to scientific papers,” says Merrie. “I’ve always felt in my gut that science fiction — taking changes in technology and socioeconomics and politics and putting it in a different context — has a lot of value.” So he sifted through dozens of scientific papers, wrote up some stories based on them, and commissioned images from nerd-approved Swedish conceptual artist Simon Stålenhag. If you recognize his style, it’s because Stalenhåg also did the cover art of a little game called No Man’s Sky.
Younger audiences, surely, demand these creative approaches. Consider the case of the author of the HBR article mentioned above, who was awakened one morning by his children:
They rousted me from bed, complaining that something was wrong with the TV. Through the frenetic complaints, I eventually realized that their program had been interrupted by ads. This was a new experience for them. They were used to watching on demand or recorded programs. Trying to explain to my children that there are advertising breaks so people can sell them things was a deflating experience. I have since learned that I am not alone in this experience, but that did not help me at the time.
Ultimately, marketers need to remember, as Forbes notes, that “the best brand-storytellers understand the critical elements of fiction writing, which are skills that few marketers have been formally trained to do.”
They also need to remember that along with their understanding of how to create stories, marketers must know when to get the hell out of the way.
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Ron Watt Jr is Founder + President of Watt + Company LLC (WATT), a marketing agency serving Fortune 500 clients worldwide.
