Product Placement Complications

Advertisers spend millions of dollars to place their brand in highly viewed shows or movies. The common belief has been that by placing your brand in specific movies, the advertiser benefits from reaching a target audience and being "endorsed" to a certain degree by the characters or actors in the show. This clip by Martin Lindstrom from Advertising Age raises an interesting question, does product placement work? According to their study which scanned the brains of consumers when they viewed the product placements, sometimes the brands were actually deleted from the viewer's mind. Whether or not this study proves that product placement actually works is questionable. A better question may be do consumers actually receive the message, properly decode it, and then become convinced to buy the product? Or, as seen from the backlash after Transformers was released, is product placement a huge incentive for consumers not to buy the product. These are important questions that advertisers must answer before paying $26 million to be a part of the next episode of American Idol.

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