the armrests of the judges’ chairs on The Voice, and Coke adorns the set of American Idol, whose contestants help to create Ford commercials: the making of these ads becomes a lengthy segment of the show. After American Idol, the biggest winner is The Biggest Loser, which has more than five hundred product occurrences per season. At approximately eighteen episodes per season, that equals thirty product mentions or product appearances per show.
To get an idea not only of how pervasive but of how embedded and subtle this has become, try this exercise I use with my students: watch one of the two-hour morning news programs and count how many times a product is being pitched to you. Do not count the commercials or the traditional marketing tools like billboards that say “This segment brought to you by Smuckers,” but rather the less blatant forms of promotion. Is CBS doing a story about football because it is a news story, or because they have the rights to the NFL? And while you are at it, are they taking a less critical view of what is going on in the league than other news outlets? Is the athlete on “Good Morning America” talking about her sport, or about her new clothing line? If you do this sort of content analysis, you will find that very little of what appears on morning “news” contains anything of the sort.
Beyond building simple brand awareness in a way that’s less intrusive and more economical than traditional advertising, marketers have good reason to use product placement.12 Most people now watch television with another device present: 84 percent of Americans use mobile phones as a second screen while watching TV.13 We may be checking email or posting to Facebook, but we also buy products: “Seventeen percent of consumers use secondary devices to purchase products featured on the programs they watch.”14
But isn’t this just like a commercial? Don’t we know we’re being pitched when we see the Coke can on the table or the lingering close-up on the car logo? Well, yes and no. Part of the reason why product placement is effective is that we tend to approach entertainment differently than we do advertising. Advertising is biased, so we look at it with our critical wits intact. Not so with entertainment. With product placement—and with all advertising to some extent—we don’t have to consciously remember the product in order for it to influence our attitude toward the brand. This is particularly true if the product appears multiple times.15 More important, according to Richard Heslin, professor of psychology at Purdue University, “When we watch a movie or something on television, our defenses are down and we become more receptive to the messages that are coming at us.”16 So if we see a product—say, GoPro cameras—used on sports programs, we might say to ourselves, “Wow! ABC Sports thinks these guys are great. Maybe I should get one.” It doesn’t work that way with an ad. If we see the product in a commercial, we are acutely aware of it, and we are more likely to think “that’s cool.” But before dropping hundreds of dollars for the camera, we’ll go check other sources of trusted information for verification of its worth. If our favorite character in a show is casually using an iPhone or a celebrity nonchalantly wears a product, we do not think of it as an endorsement, and we tend to accept it, as we do editorial content or the TV show itself—an important idea to keep in mind when we look at content marketing.
Another place where this psychological mechanism plays out in untold measure is celebrity endorsements, particularly those made via social media. Public relations firms that have long worked with celebrities have added content integration to their toolkit. For example, Bang & Olufsen (B&O) wanted to introduce their high-end headphones (BeoPlay H6) to the U.S. market, so they hired Kari Feinstein Public Relations (KFPR). This company is well known for their “Style Lounges,” events held at major film festivals and award shows where companies pay to get their products in front of celebrities. For B&O, KFPR used a combination of their Style Lounge, editorial press, social media, and product seeding (aka product placement) to drive awareness of the headphones. They got the product into the hands of celebrities like Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad, who posted a picture of himself wearing the headphones on his Instagram account. Importantly, he does not mention the headphones; he is just casually wearing them around his neck. Dozens of other celebrities and online influencers did the same, until it appeared that the headphones were everywhere. According to KFPR’s website, Bang & Olufsen ended up with 1.2 million “Likes,” 450 million press impressions, and 120 million online impressions, for a total of 570 million impressions, or more than half a billion people being exposed to the headphones—all without traditional advertising.17
The practice of seeding products to generate press impressions is not new. What is new is the concerted effort to combine celebrity product endorsements with the ability to track the number of people engaging with the product. Oliver Luckett of theAudience Agency explained how this works to Douglas Rushkoff in his Frontline documentary Generation Like: “What we do is we basically run the social media on behalf of entertainers and artists and musicians and actors, and we help them express themselves inside of this medium.”18 (There are no statistics on this, but you can be pretty sure that your favorite celebrity is not writing his or her own content.) Not only do they manage the social component, but theAudience also produces content, like music videos, and then inserts products into that content. With Luckett’s help, celebrities are reaching millions of fans and generating hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, which is something brands want to be attached to. Not only that, because of data analytics and “Likes,” it is possible to determine the intersection between companies and celebrities, and that crossover can be exploited. As Luckett explained, “So if you’re connected to Ian [Somerhalder of Vampire Diaries] and he likes the product, and then you like Ian and you like the product, then now you’ve got a double endorsement to your friends.”19 This, of course, should make us wonder why a celebrity “Likes” a particular brand and who’s paying them to do so. Not only that: all those “Like” buttons you’ve been casually clicking are in truth not about demonstrating your interests, but are instead a deceptive means to update product placement in the digital age.
Marketers love all of this because it has made their lives easier. Tracking product placement used to be hard work, and few companies could account for the value of product insertions. Now marketers can have the information sent to their desktops, and return on their investment (ROI) can be assessed instantaneously. Not only is online content trackable, but the Internet provides for the perfect marriage of content and commerce: consumers are rarely more than a click away from what they might want to buy. If you see a celebrity wearing B&O headphones in your Facebook feed and you want to buy them, simply click a button.
Finally, there are immersive online environments that provide the perfect combination of product and entertainment. These are most common in advergames targeted at kids, websites that are created to engage rather than to sell outright (mostly because the target audience is too young to have a credit card), and they provide endless hours of entertainment.20 Instances include sites like Barbie.com or Club Penguin, as well as the many food sites for kids such as Happymeal. com from McDonald’s or cereal brand Luckycharms.com, which has a note at the bottom of the page that says, “Hey kids, this is advertising,” a disclaimer that would be helpful if the site was targeted to kids of reading age, which it is not. Truly immersive experiences for kids exist in games like Neopets and Webkinz that encourage children to develop emotional attachments to virtual pets that “respond” with happiness when properly tended to, tending that usually requires buying either virtual or real products. The goal is to manipulate users’ emotions to inspire consumer behavior that ranges from paying subscription fees to engaging in micropurchases for upgrades and new game levels.21 While not specifically covert, I highlight these here because children under the age of eight cannot differentiate between advertising and editorial content, and because these websites are the type of advertising environments that Millennials grew up with: fun, engaging, online, and time consuming.
These examples show the significant and fundamental shift that is taking place: brands no longer merely place products in content; they actively create it. Put another way, the media environment we have
