Where Are Their Packages?!

Watching too much television got me into a lot of trouble as I was growing up.  My parents didn’t frown on my obsession with entertainment; they just insisted that I do my chores and homework before I became engrossed in whatever was airing at the time.  Often I would forget my homework or my chores because of my love of television and I had to suffer the consequences.  But the entertainment that was coming from that little box was my get-away from my boring world in rural small-town Alabama. I became so involved in the shows that I was watching that my emotions would take over and I would build relationships with the characters and their plight.  As I grew older and ventured out into the world all over the United States, television still was amazingly important to me, but I learned to separate fiction from reality better.  Yet still today, I find myself feeling strongly for entertainment characters.  Therefore when our topic of product placement came up this week, I reflected back on how sorry I felt for the characters of Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks.  While watching the hit movie, first I felt sorry for him having to survive alone on a deserted island for so long.  But at the beginning of the movie, I remember feeling sorry for the “owners” of all of those Fed-Ex packages that never got to their destination. Let’s just say that the product placement in this movie and in others is interestingly important and this marketing practice is ever-changing.

This week in Leadership and Media Strategies, our emphasis is on message development and placement.  We have information about product placement from a lot of interesting sources.  A study we read on the placement of political messages is important in that we just finished a tumultuous campaign season that often took the low road in attack ads.  Thank goodness that this one is over.  Modern media is so prevalent that we were bombarded with political messages everywhere from traditional media to modern Internet social media.  I was overwhelmed, and believe it or not, I found myself watching less and less television, my beloved entertainment staple.  The article “Campaign Ads, Online Messaging, and Participation: Extending the Communication Mediation Model” that was found in the Journal of Communication noted that too much exposure to political attack ads might result in a backlash against the campaign pushing the negative ads.  I wonder if that is what happened in this election cycle that resulted in so many voters not coming out that had voted four years ago.  Both sides equally attacked each other, especially towards the end. I don’t think that Clinton ads were more negative than Trump’s, but others may have felt so. If so, the Republican organizers did a better job of political advertising placement than the Democrats.  I just wonder what future studies will show.

Other fascinating information this week came from numerous studies and opinions on message development and product placement in television series and blockbuster movies.  Our always inspiring TED Talks this week featured Morgan Spurlock in The Greatest TED Talk Ever Sold. Spurlock gave a hilarious presentation about the not so subtle tactics of modern product placement.  He talked about his marketing pitch to Hollywood to do a film totally about product placement that would be funded by product placement, marketing and advertising called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." Every definition of product placement says that the marketing technique should be a subtle placement of a commercial brand to blend in with the piece and not jump out at the audience. In the article “Making the Invisible Transparent,” the authors note that in marketing, professionals should “make the consumer the authority through their freedom to discover – to stumble upon – the promotional message rather than being subjected to it. Spurlock’s amusing in-your-face movie pitch to entertainment executives turned out to be not so amusing to them at all, but it was funny. He did a good job of allowing the executives and us, his TED Talk audience, to take a good look at product placement and how it can get out of control. 

Some studies such as the one entitled “When Product Placement Goes Wrong: The Effects of Program Liking and Placement Prominence” by Elizabeth Cowley and Chris Barron points out that the technique should occur “under consumers’ radar.”  Many messages and their placements are now so blatant and the practice occurs so often that I truly understand Spurlock’s comedy in his tactics in pitching his film.  The mentioned study and others show that product placement that is not subtle may turn audiences off towards the brand because it may interfere with their natural enjoyment of the piece.  Other studies show that too subtle placement may make a product go undetected and have no effect at all.  So how should marketing professionals approach the practice in a world of traditional media and the world of increasing Internet and social media?

            The fact that entertainment executives wanted nothing to do with Spurlock’s idea tells me that it is noted that going over the top with product placement is troublesome, but that professionals have to continue to study the markets and come up with subtle ways to continue to grab all markets.  The key word again is “subtle” because unlike “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” and unlike too many political attack ads, marketing does not want to turn the public off and garner a negative connotation towards their brand. 

But this all brings me back to Cast Away.  I recall two products placements, Fed-Ex and that basketball, Wilson.  Wilson’s brand did not stand out to me, but Fed-Ex certainly did, as I painfully worried about those customers not getting their packages. Now, I have a heart and wanted Hanks to be survive and be rescued, but I was concerned with how the castaway just helped himself to someone else’s possessions. Sure I wanted him to survive, but I also wanted those people to get their packages. Yet the whole time, I had no idea of how the marketing technique was working in a very subtle way back then to allow several companies exposure in a big movie.  Studying the markets and keeping up with media and social trends will allow marketing professionals to continue to use product placement to tap into a huge market and not even remind them that they are there marketing themselves within your beloved entertainment.