Archive for January, 2007

This is a really old Rocky and Bullwinkle opening clip complete with a General Mills product placement. I love how products were made a part of these old shows rather than today’s method of sneaking in product placements. Hell, we know you can’t have a show without advertisements, you might as well make it blatant. I’d love to turn on the TV and watch Colgate presents: Lost. Or something like that. Both Rocky and Bullwinkle also appeared in television and print ads for General Mills cereals, including Cheerios.
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MOST WANTED
By SHELLY FREIERMAN, New York Times

Published: January 29, 2007
Is it how often you see a brand or how central it is to the plot that determines the effectiveness of a product placement on television? According to ITVX, a media research company, the most effective placement last year had Christine Hicks (above) and other cast members on ”7th Heaven” repeatedly dunking their Oreo cookies in milk, calling it their favorite, and munching away in warm family scenes.

ITVX’s Q-Ratio is a score based on criteria like foreground or background shots, verbal mentions and hands-on images.
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While product placements have long been common in TV, film and videogames, a host of startups hope to make them as easy to buy and sell as Pez dispensers on eBay.
Several companies are developing online placement marketplaces in hopes of cultivating a market for smaller deals. The markets could push product into every conceivable corner of showbiz.

“We see that landscape as incredibly valuable but incredibly inefficient today,” says Hamet Watt, a former investment banker and founder of NextMedium, which has developed software designed to both place and track product placements.

These are not the multi-million-dollar high-profile deals like ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and Sears or “Friday Night Lights” and Toyota. Those deals are done on the CEO level, involve many facets and much hand-holding.

Instead, they are targeting smaller deals for products within shows. With networks decreasing ad inventory, advertisers shifting away from the 30-second spot, and both networks and production companies looking for additional revenue streams, product placements are becoming more important to the networks and advertisers.

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Coke!