Product placement, also known as embedded marketing, is a marketing technique where references to specific brands or products are incorporated into another work, such as a film or television program, with specific promotional intent. Much of this is done by loaning products, especially when expensive items, such as vehicles, are involved. In 2021, the agreements between brand owners and films and television programs were worth more than US$20 billion. Incorporated into works to maintain a feeling of realism or be a subject of commentary, product placement is the deliberate incorporation of references to a brand or product in exchange for compensation. Product placements may range from unobtrusive appearances within an environment, to prominent integration and acknowledgement of the product within the work. When deliberate product placement is not announced to the viewer, it is considered a form of covert advertising. Common categories of products used for placements include automobiles and consumer electronics. Works produced by vertically integrated companies (such as Sony) may use placements to promote their other divisions as a form of corporate synergy. During the 21st century, the use of product placement on television has grown, particularly to combat the wider use of digital video recorders that can skip traditional commercial breaks, as well as to engage with younger demographics. Digital editing technology is also being used to tailor product placement to specific demographics or markets, and in some cases, add placements to works that did not originally have embedded advertising, or update existing placements.
History
Origins
Product placement began in the 19th century. By the time Jules Verne published the adventure novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), his fame had led transport and shipping companies to lobby to be mentioned in the story. Whether Verne was actually paid to do so remains unknown. Similarly, a painting by Édouard Manet (1881–1882) shows a bar at the Folies Bergère with distinctive bottles placed at either end of the counter. The beer bottle is immediately recognisable as Bass beer. Manet's motivations for including branded products in his painting are unknown; it may be that it simply added to the work's authenticity, but on the other hand the artist may have received some payment in return for its inclusion. Research reported by Jean-Marc Lehu (2007) suggests that films produced by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1896 were made at the request of a representative of Lever Brothers in France. The films feature Sunlight soap, which may be the first recorded instance of paid product placement in film. This led to cinema becoming one of the earliest channels used for product placement.
With the arrival of photo-rich periodicals in the late 19th century, publishers found ways of lifting their paper's reputation by placing an issue of the magazine in photographs of prominent people. For example, the German magazine Die Woche in 1902 printed an article about a countess in her castle where she, in one of the photographs, holds a copy of the magazine in her hands. Product placement was a common feature of many of the earliest actualities and cinematic attractions from the first ten years of cinema history. During the next four decades, the motion picture trade journal Harrison's Reports frequently cited cases of on-screen brand-name placement. Harrison condemned the practice as harmful to movie theatres, and his editorials reflected his hostility towards product placement in films. Harrison's Reports published its first denunciation of that practice over Red Crown gasoline's appearance in The Garage (1920). Another editorial criticised the collaboration between the Corona Typewriter company and First National Pictures when a Corona typewriter appeared in several films in the mid-1920s including The Lost World (1925). Recognisable brand names appeared in movies from cinema's earliest history. Before films had narrative form in the current sense, industrial concerns financed the making of what film scholar Tom Gunning described as "cinematic attractions", short films of one or two minutes. In the first decade or so of film (1895–1907) audiences attended films as "fairground attractions" interesting for their then-amazing visual effects. This format was better suited to product placement than narrative cinema. Leon Gurevitch argued that early cinematic attractions have more in common with television advertisements in the 1950s than they do with traditional films. Gurevitch suggested that as a result, the relationship between cinema and advertising is intertwined, suggesting that cinema was in part the result of advertising and the economic benefits that it provided early filmmakers. Segrave detailed the industries that were advertised in these early films.
Movies and television
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