Brand practice
April 28, 2005
 "American Idol"
Product integration is as old as Hollywood itself.
It wasn't just television comedy that NBC's "Seinfeld" managed to shake up during its eight seasons on the air. The groundbreaking show about nothing is credited with finally breaking down the decades-old resistance by the major broadcast networks to product placement in primetime. It was Jerry's butter fingers with an infamous box of Junior Mints candy in the beloved 1993 episode "The Junior Mint" that showed marketers the way of the future. They didn't need to settle for mere placement on a shelf in a kitchen scene. With a little creativity, a product could find its way into the script, becoming an integral part of a storyline and assuring that audiences would remember it the next day. A few years later, an enterprising British producer by the name of Mark Burnett would take product placement and brand integration to new heights and spearhead an entirely new breed of unscripted, competition-based primetime franchises such as CBS' "Survivor" and NBC's "The Apprentice." Still, it was that single wayward Junior Mint in "Seinfeld" that many in the industry credit with prompting major TV outlets to start questioning their long-held beliefs about product placement interfering with their ability to sell multiple sponsors into a show. "Seinfeld broke the barrier on brand-name products in television," says Brad Brown, who co-founded one of the first major product placement agencies, Davie-Brown, in 1985. "The brand became a plot point, and it was so successful that they (NBC) looked the other way." Indeed, no money was ever paid for placements on "Seinfeld," often cited as some of the most successful in television history, but it set the stage for broadcast and cable and network shows to begin raking in cash from eager brands in the coming decade. Formative years These days, watching the hosts of "American Idol" drink Coca-Cola or seeing contestants on "The Apprentice" pitching Crest toothpaste has become the norm in primetime, but product placement in various incarnations dates back to the earliest days of film, long before television entered American homes. The pioneering Lumiere Brothers, who created the first motion picture projector in 1895, recognized immediately the potential their invention had to influence the masses. Their 1896 short film, "Washing Day in Switzerland," was one of the first motion pictures ever projected on a screen -- and it featured strategically-placed cases of Sunlight Soap. Much like the way deals come together in today's business, the placement was engineered by the film's producer, Henri Lavanchy-Clarke, who also worked as a publicist for the soap's manufacturer, Lever Brothers, according to Jay Newell, assistant professor at the Greenlee School of Journalism at Iowa State University. "Product placement is much older than Hollywood," Newell says. "And this first placement was no accident." While there's no evidence about whether the intrepid brothers' move sold any more boxes of soap, it wasn't long before it became clear that movies and television exerted a powerful influence on consumer behavior. In the small screen's infancy, Milton Berle, who hosted the Texaco Star Theater, was dubbed Mr. Television and credited with luring audiences to buy TV sets just to see what the outrageous comedian would do next. (No doubt Texaco -- whose sponsorship was represented by four uniformed singing Texaco Service Men belting out the opening theme song -- would have rather seen gas sales increase exponentially.) One of the first films to have such an impact was "It Happened One Night" in 1934. After Clark Cable was seen bare-chested in the movie, sales of men's undershirts plummeted. Then in 1955's "Rebel Without a Cause," sales of Ace combs soared after James Dean swept one through his hair; later, consumers snapped up Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses after seeing Tom Cruise don a pair in "Risky Business" in 1983. From the Ford Model T in the Keystone Kops series to Owl cigars in the 1932 film "Scarface" to Gordon's gin in 1951's "African Queen," product placement has been as crucial to Hollywood as the dime-store starlet. In the formative years of commercial network TV, marketers of course called most of the shots by actually producing and paying for the programming. And though the move to filmed entertainment from Hollywood and an FCC crackdown in the 1950s gradually shifted the control of programming to the networks, sponsored programming in recent years has started to make a big comeback as advertisers search for more effective ways to reach consumers who are able to TiVo through 30-second spots. "Television was commercial almost from the very beginning," Newell explains. "There was never a line between art and commerce." Phone home While advertisers have paid for placements as far back as the earliest days of film, many of the placements cited as the biggest success stories, such as Ray-Ban in "Risky Business" and Federal Express in the 2000 film "Castaway," were thought up by writers or filmmakers and didn't cost the brands any placement fees or promotional dollars. None of these placements had a bigger impact on the fortunes of a product than the one in a little 1982 film about a lost alien. Considered by far the most successful of all time, Reese's Pieces in Steven Spielberg's blockbuster "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" set a new standard."That movie showed that a brand that was practically unheard-of could have a huge sales increase," says Mary Lou Galician, head of media analysis and criticism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University and editor of "The Handbook of Product Placement in the Mass Media." The Reese's Pieces placement became such a benchmark for the practice that it was actually cited in earlier research and press reports as the beginning of the product placement business, according to Newell. In fact, the term "product placement" shows up in the press for the first time in 1982, Newell says. Before that it was referred to as product plugs, hidden plugs or exploitation. As studios became more sophisticated about harnessing the power of placement, they began to ask brands to kick in additional dollars to promote the movie, with the idea that a bigger opening would yield a bigger impact on consumers. But the real turning point for cross-promotion was Bond, James Bond. MGM's turbo-charged revival of the franchise with "GoldenEye" in 1995 and 1997's "Tomorrow Never Dies" two years later "wrote the modern book" on how to implement large-scale cross-promotions that accompany product integrations within a movie, Galician says. "These movies just shifted everything to a whole new level of what could be done and how much could be done," Galician says. For "GoldenEye," BMW said it spent $3 million on cross-promotions for the right to replace Bond's Aston Martin with its new Z3 Roadster model and to use the film to launch the vehicle internationally. However, "Tomorrow Never Dies," which reportedly earned a record $160 million in fees and marketing support from 20 different advertisers, was sharply criticized for being too commercial. That backlash led marketers to be more cautious about tying in to films that have too many promotional partners. And yet the cash kept furiously exchanging hands. Insiders say Ford spent $35 million on promotions and fees to return Bond to an Aston Martin and feature other Ford cars in 2002's "Die Another Day," but the most any brand is believed to have spent on media buys and promotions in exchange for a film placement is $100 million, which Samsung shelled out to place its phones in 2003's "The Matrix Reloaded." Despite the scramble to align themselves with summer blockbusters, not all of these deals have happy endings. Some marketers have found out the hard way that the way their product is featured isn't always in line with a brand's message. Coca-Cola was horrified when its Polar bear commercial -- which it had approved for placement -- showed up on a TV set during a gruesome murder scene in Oliver Stone's 1994 film "Natural Born Killers." Getting real Brand integration hit an all-time high once reality-show guru Mark Burnett hit primetime. With the massive success of CBS' "Survivor" in 2000, advertisers concerned about TiVo started pouring millions of dollars into branded entertainment. They took note of the potential of product integration after millions of viewers watched starving, dehydrated "Survivor" contestants salivating over hard-owned rewards like Doritos, Mountain Dew and Bud Light in the show's second season. "The modern inflection point for the drive of product placement and why it's overtaken film as the largest part of the product placement market is reality television," says Patrick Quinn, president of PQ Media, which just issued a study last month that found the total value of the product placement market soared 31% to an all-time high of $3.5 billion last year. Some of the most recent success stories have been Coke on "American Idol," "Sears" on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, a whole host of men's apparel, beauty and home products on "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and major brands like Burger King, Crest and Mattel on "The Apprentice." And while product placement dates back to the very first days of both film and television, it has never before had the kind of revenue-generating potential for networks and studios that is has today nor the potential to change the face of the entertainment industry -- not only by giving brands starring roles in film and television but by attracting advertisers willing to spend millions of dollars to produce their own entertainment content.
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Brand practice: Product integration
Brand aid: Product placement hits
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