How Product Placement Puts Your Brand In Front of Your Target Customers

What is product placement?

Have you ever noticed in the big movies how often you see major brands?

More often than not, the PC or mobile phone somebody is using is an Apple or perhaps a Samsung. All the vehicles could be Fords, or there might be several BMWs. 

Your favourite influencers on social media? Chances are that they are sponsored by brands to promote their products. 

This is called product placement, which is a form of advertising but attempts to persuade in a far less obvious way than traditional advertising.


What is Product Placement?

Also known as embedded marketing, product placement is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Companies pay to have commercial content such as their brand, products or services incorporated into non-commercial content such as film, TV or other mainstream media. The idea is to use the placement whilst maintaining realism with context or plot.

The audience gets exposed a brand, product or service being consumed in its natural setting; positively influencing their perceptions and opinions of the brand. They are not meant to notice that it is advertising — that is the power of product placement.

“In its simplest form, product placement consists of an advertiser or company producing some engaging content in order to sell something.” (Falkow, 2010)

 

Product placements can be subtle or more obvious. Ranging from an unobtrusive appearance within the setting, or more prominent incorporation and acknowledgement of the brand as part of the plot.

The product itself does not have to be shown; it could be a logo, signage or brand name for example. More subtle product placement could avoid showing the brand itself but instead showing a distinct colour scheme or other feature synonymous with that brand.

Consumer products such as electronics (Apple products for example) or automobiles, as well as service placements (such as McDonald’s), that target ultimate household consumers are the most common placement, but business-to-business promotions are becoming more common.

The vast number of media that use product placements include films, television programs, celebrities/influencers via social media, video games, blogs, music videos, concerts, magazines, books, comics, musicals and plays, live sport, radio, the internet, and mobile phones.

Product placement on television has grown rapidly to try and combat people skipping traditional commercial breaks. According to Priceonomics, television accounts for just over 70 percent of all paid product placements, and approximately 75% of all broadcast-network shows feature some form of product placement.

Films can often use multiple brands as product placements, Superman: Man of Steel is reported to have used $160 million worth of product placements promotions with over 100 brands.

“Since Unilever’s deliberate insertion of Sunlight Soap into several early Lumière films of the late 1890s, the practice of placing branded products within films for commercial purposes has developed into a distinct promotional tool.” (De Gregorio & Sung, 2010)

 

A Brief History of Product Placement

Although the term product placement was only created to describe this practice as recently as the 1980s, it is not a new practice. Instead, dating back to the first appearance of brands in Lumière films in 1896.

Product placement was not always monetised — many of the product placement deals were cash-free; instead, the arrangement was often reciprocal, items were borrowed and used as props by studios and television networks, reducing the cost of production. Products could be moved as well as selling movie tickets.

Commercial product placements were integrated into the creation and marketing of mass media content as early as the 1920s. The first spurt of popularity came in the 1950s, where tobacco companies tried to glamorise smoking cigarettes in TV and film.

In the 1980s, product placements became widely used after E.T. followed a trail of Reese’s Pieces out of the woods, resulting in a reported 65% increase in profits for Hershey’s.

“In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the alien followed a trail of Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces to his new home. The movie was a hit, sales of Reese’s Pieces increased dramatically, and to some the product placement industry was born.” (Newell, Salmon, & Chang, 2006)

 

The Benefits of Product Placement

This fusion of advertising and entertainment helps brands to reach and engage with many of their target audience.

Because many people find traditional ads are annoying or irrelevant, it is estimated that two-thirds of TV viewers mute or skip ads. A major benefit of product placement is they cannot be skipped — they are embedded into the TV program, movie or other media itself.

The brand is often associated with the characters or context of the placement, so they must match to create a compatible match, which usually achieves positive evaluations.

Brands placed with attractive characters or settings can often be more appealing to the audience/consumers. This can be attributed to the ‘halo effect’, where a positive association with a show or person creates a positive association with the corresponding product or brand.

Viewers can become emotionally invested in the storyline in which a brand is presented. Because of this, the placement can encourage purchase intent.

When a placement is integrated seamlessly into a piece of media, the brand is seen in context, so it markets to consumers less directly. This means consumers’ persuasion knowledge is less likely to be triggered; this is a barrier that consumers put up to resist persuasion attempts from marketing that is too obtrusive.

Product placements can also boost brand recognition — the audience is also more likely to be able to recognise and name a brand after seeing it in product placement.

A study by Williams, Petrosky, Hernandez, & Page Jr (2011) found that just over 57 percent of TV viewers recognized a brand in placement when the brand also was advertised during the show.

The final major benefit is that movies and TV programs can be watched many times over several years, so their value is not limited to when it is originally aired.

“Viewers are able to correctly recognize brands placed in films and consumers do not really mind seeing products placed in motion pictures.” (La Ferle & Edwards, 2006)

American Idol — product placement of Coke 

How Product Placement Works

Product placement is all about context. To present a product or service in a way that will produce positive feelings towards that brand and hopefully influence peoples’ buying behaviour to purchase the brand. This connects with the audience in a more natural way than advertising when consumers are marketed to directly.

Product placements can be initiated directly through the firm’s marketing team suggesting their products to a studio or producers of a TV/Movie, or it could go the other way. Some companies and agents work as an intermediary to match companies with product placement opportunities. The brands in placements should be matched as closely as possible with the projected target audience of that piece of media.

Because of this potential influence over an audience, product placement should be ethical. The placement of brands of tobacco or alcohol for example can be viewed as unacceptable by much of the audience, especially in content created for youth.

There are two main forms of product placements: visual and verbal.

A visual placement involves placing a brand into a piece of media, so it is viewed. It could be an advertising hoarding in the background of a shot, or it could be of more importance in a scene, such as a cast member eating a packet of branded potato chips.

A verbal placement refers to the brand being mentioned in dialogue. There are varying degrees of audio placement, depending on the context in which the product is mentioned, the frequency with which it is mentioned, and the emphasis placed on the product name. Purely verbal placement we are called script placement.

A plot placement that relies on placing the brand both on the screen and in the conversation provides an opportunity for both verbal and visual encoding, whereas the other situations would activate only one form of encoding.

If a brand’s product becomes part of the plot -playing a major place in the storyline of building the persona of a character, this is a plot placement. Where a brand is identified with a character, e.g. James Bond and his Aston Martin, this is high intensity. A brief mention and appearance on screen low intensity.

Based on the coding redundancy hypothesis (See Paivio 1971), “…memory increases directly with the number of alternative memory codes available for an item”. Visual and audio activate different codes, and therefore different combinations of screen and script placement vary in effectiveness and brand recall.

“Virtual product placement” has been used to insert products and/or advertisements into portions of a media stream, where the products and/or advertisements may not actually exist.” (Gajdos & Pettersson, 2011)

 

The Digital Age of Product Placements

Advances in digital editing technology allow producers to update existing placements or create new ones in post-production, sometimes changing items used in shows long after they were filmed.

In live sports broadcasted to viewers, an advertisement on a billboard can be created where the advertisement is different than what physically exists. It may be a different ad or there might not even be an advertisement there in the first place.

On TV and in movies, virtual product placements can be inserted after the movie has been produced. Examples of this could be an advertising sign inserted into the background of a scene advertise a brand, or a beverage a person is drinking being altered to display a specific brand.

With advances in AI, product placements can be inserted into a media stream based on information about the consumer watching it, meaning brands relevant to that individual can be used, becoming more targeted to their personal interests.

Product placement has exploded on social media in the form of influencer marketing. An influencer is a social media personality with a following, who are paid to include products in their content to boost that brand’s popularity with their following. If the following of an influencer matches the target market of a brand, then they are a good fit.

Influencer marketing can range from a small mention in a post to the topic of a piece of content. The more obvious the product placement, the more it is deemed to be considered too ‘commercial’ by the followers of that social media influencer and the less effective it is likely to be.

“The extent to which the placement is prominent, whereby more prominence seems to evoke more negative reactions.” (Ewers, 2017)

 

Product Placement in Retail Settings

Product placement not only applies to media — but it can also apply to physical retail shop space. Brands will pay top dollar for prime space on the retail floor and shelves. This includes large endcap (end of an aisle) displays, the area next to the register where you checkout, or having item at eye level on the shelves and limiting shelf space their competitors — known as a slotting or shelving fee.

Large brands pay good money for this premium shelving space, this makes it harder for small brands and new businesses to break into the commercial retail market.


In summary, product placement is when a company pays to have commercial content such as their brand incorporated into a piece of media such as a film, or TV program, to expose it to the audience which is usually a good fit with their target market.

This aims to positively influence their perceptions and opinions of the brand in a less obtrusive way than traditional advertising. 

This article has explored product placement, how it works and the benefits of using it as a marketing strategy.

Thank you for reading.

I hope you enjoyed the content and learnt something new.

This was initially posted on the BYB Marketing Bloghttps://brandyourselfbetter.com/blog/post/197065/how-product-placement-puts-your-brand-in-front-of-your-target-customers


How to Optimise Your Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Optimising your Pay per click advertising

The first place that many people go to search for information about a product, service or brand is an online search. Probably Google. 

From the convenience of our computers or mobile phones, we have access to all the information we will need. If a business wants customers to find them online, they must optimise their presence on these search engines so customers find them before their competitors. 

There are two ways to do this, SEO and Pay per click ads. 

This blog explores how Pay-per-click advertising works and gives recommendations on how a business can optimise their strategy.




What is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising?

Pay-per-click advertising is a form of digital marketing, originally developed as a method of creating revenue for search engines. Along with organic (non-paid) search results, paid ads make up a second list of results.

Ads appear alongside the organic (non-paid) results on a search engine results page (SERP), companies paying to their links displayed in this sponsored section.

You can think of it like buying visits to your site instead of earning those visits organically through search engine optimisation (SEO). As the name suggests, businesses running the PPC ads are only charged when a user clicks on their ad.

There numerous PPC ads, the most common being search engine advertising, as explained above. Google ads are by far the most popular, Bing coming in a distant second. Google ads are the main subject of this article.

Other types of PPC advertising include display advertising (banner ads) and remarketing where people see an ad because they previously interacted with your company. With display ads, the owner of a webpage allows businesses to advertise on their website.

Also referred to as contextual advertising, keywords in the content of the webpage trigger what ads visitors are shown.

Businesses running ads are in an ongoing competition for popular keywords — ads are subjected to an ‘Ad Auction’. Based on competition, advertisers bid on certain keywords for ad placement and the search engine uses algorithmic calculations to determine which ads are displayed and in what order.

As well as the cost-per-click bid (the highest amount an advertiser is willing to spend), the other factor that determines the ad rank is the Quality Score assigned by Google. This will be discussed further later.

“As PPC suggests, advertisers also have to pay for every click they receive via that sponsored link.” (Kritzinger & Weideman, 2013)

 

The Benefits of PPC

Because businesses are only charged when a potential customer clicks on their ad, it is a pretty effective form of advertising. Imagine how many people would drive past a billboard and see it, but never act. Results can be more objectively measured.

Businesses also benefit by reaching potential customers at a price that fits the budget they set for the campaign.

There are far fewer PPC advertisements on a search result page than the organic results, so businesses better chance of being seen by internet searchers. It is also extremely hard to rank in the first few results organically — usually, it is a large investment in SEO over a period, that most businesses do not have the expertise to do themselves.

It is much easier to set up a Google ad and rank — if you have the budget for it. Users of PPC ads choose the geographic areas they want their ads to be shown in, so it is a powerful way to focus your advertising to locations you are trying to target.

There are three beneficiaries with PPC ads. First, the website or search engine displaying the ads get paid for the advertising space, the advertiser who attracts customers and the customer who is provided with relevant results for their search query. Keywords ensure the ad should be just as relevant as the organic results.

“Google makes 99% of its profit through the PPC model of Internet advertising.” (Kapoor, Dwivedi, & Piercy, 2016)

 

Creating a PPC Campaign

First, create logically organized Ad Groups. An ad group has one or more ads sharing similar target audiences — it organises ads by theme. Next, research, select and organise closely related keywords into these Ad Groups. Then, ads are created for these ad groups. Each Ad Group should consist of a minimum of two ad variations.

A campaign has one or more ad groups. Ad groups should be as specific as possible, to ensure they are relevant to customers

Campaigns need a start and finish date. Before getting started, work out your daily budget, based on the campaign length. Sometimes it can spill over budget slightly, so allow for around a 10% contingency — tell Google your budget is 10% less than it is, just in case.

Each keyword has an average cost per click depending on the competition, so based on your overall budget, calculate how much you to spend on your chosen keyword bids.

Analyzing your pay per click ads

Analysing Your PPC Results

Spend money to test, learn from their results, and then refine your ads to optimise your campaign results. One of the advantages of digital marketing is the amount of data it creates, empowering businesses with information to improve their advertising. Continuously analysing your performance allowing you to make small adjustments at a time to optimize your campaigns.

Test your campaigns and ad groups. This is when you start spending money. Test variations of your keywords, ad copy and landing pages. Dedicate time and money into educating yourself what works best for your business. Start with more than one version of your ad — you do not know how it could be improved if you only run one ad. If it does not work, you blow your whole budget.

Learn by analysing the results of your ads. This provides valuable consumer feedback in terms of their behaviour when exposed to your ads. Objective data to improve your ads and gain a better understanding of the best keywords to use and how much to pay for each click.

When we understand our ROI for different keywords, we can find expensive and under-performing keywords which can be removed and those we want to bid higher on to achieve a higher Ad Rank and improve your Quality Score. You can also identify negative keywords that you do not want to trigger your ads.

By checking ‘see search terms’, you can see which terms triggered your ads. It also helps to discover new keywords to add to your existing campaigns.

An impression is when keywords trigger an ad to be shown in the results. Impression share is the percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total number in the market you were targeting.

Other key metrics to monitor are page views per visit, time on site and conversion rate.

Creating a UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) snippet tag for ads to help identify the link in Google Analytics. This allows you to identify what ad campaign was most successful. how visitors came to land on the landing page.

Optimise your ads by refining them to modify what is not working. Make changes to your keyword lists, ads and landing pages to find the formula and user experience that works best for your business.

“…allows advertisers to place bids on specific keywords or phrases and have their advertisements show up alongside the organic search engine results.” (Boughton, 2005)

 

Optimising Your Ads

To make sure we get the best return on investment from our PPC ads, we must optimise them to get the best result. This section discusses four ways to optimise your ads: Keyword relevance, Google’s quality score and creating more targeted ad copy and landing pages. There are tools available to analyse your ads, such as Wordstream’s free AdWords Performance Grader.


Keyword relevance

PPC campaigns are built around keywords. The Keywords within a search query trigger what results are shown. Therefore, businesses need to figure out what terms their target customers will be searching for.

Create tight keyword groups with a mixture of low-cost, highly relevant keywords and frequently searched terms relevant to your business.

Long-tail keywords should be included; these are more targeted search phrases that contain the more generic keywords (head) with modifiers that make it relevant to a more specific audience. For example, instead of just ‘marketing’, ‘digital marketing strategy in Hamilton’.

Once you learn more about what is working and what is not, you can add Negative Keywords. These are non-converting search terms that you can exclude from your campaigns, to become more targeted by improving campaign relevancy and reducing the wasted budget by focusing on your best-performing keywords.

Google Keyword Planner is a great tool to help with keyword research. It highlights the search volume and cost per click for keywords and suggests relevant terms. Wordstream also provides a free keyword tool to help you find the most relevant keywords to use for your business.


Quality score

The quality and relevance of your keywords, landing pages, and PPC campaigns. better Quality Scores mean more ad clicks at lower costs.

Assigned independently by Google, Quality Score includes:

  • The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) measure of how convincing your ad is to your target audience. of the keyword and the matched ad
  • The CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
  • Landing page quality
  • Keyword relevance to the ads in its ad group
  • Keyword relevance to the matched ad and search query
  • Account performance in the geographical region where it is shown


Ad Copy

Your ad copy should be relevant to the landing page where you send them. If it is not, this will affect your quality score. To test your ads, run two or three variations per ad campaign to test different titles and descriptions.

To optimise your ads, your headline should not exceed 60 characters, and your description should not exceed 80 characters.

However, Google does prefer longer headlines as this is where information is most likely to be noticed. The most important keywords should also be communicated in your ad copy.

Landing page to sign up to receive a free eBook

Landing page

The landing page is where a person goes after clicking on an ad. Do not make the mistake of sending every ad directly to your homepage.

Send people directly to a custom landing page matching the ad content, that is optimised to minimise bounce rates and increase conversion rates. 

The image above is an example of a landing page to sign up to receive a free eBook. This could be the focus of a PPC ad, to add relevant people to your database.

Content should be specifically tailored to the ad and have clear calls-to-action (CTAs) aligned with the search queries that would have triggered the ad.

Sending people to a general page means it might not be relevant to what they initially searched, and they probably will not be able to find the information they require easily. They are likely to hit the back button or close the window/tab. Users are unlikely to navigate through further pages to find what they need.


How to Create a Value Proposition for Your Business

 What is a value proposition

As a business, we need to capture the attention of potential customers as quickly as possible by telling them how we provide a solution to their needs.

If customers understand exactly how our business provides them with a solution, they are more likely to become customers than if the value proposition leaves them confused as to what exactly we do. 

This blog explores the Value Proposition and strategy on how to create one for your own business or brand.



What a Value Proposition?

A value proposition is a firm’s summary statement of why a customer would choose their product or service.

It is our promise to a group of customers, communicating our primary benefit and how we uniquely deliver value. It introduces our brand to consumers by communicating what our company stands for, what we do, and why we deserve the customer’s business.

We must clearly explain how the benefits of our brand’s products or services fit their need better than comparable products on the market.

Our benefits then become crystal clear to customers from the outset to persuade prospects to become paying customers. The number one reason a product or service is best suited to that customer must be communicated directly to consumers — through our website and other marketing materials.

The value proposition is an essential element of a firm’s overall marketing strategy. Unique to a firm, it becomes the foundation for our brand identity, branding strategy and position in the market.

However, it is not the same thing as a positioning statement. Positioning is just one component of our value proposition –communicating what makes our products or service unique from the competition.

“A clear and effective value proposition should be the basis of a firm’s functional, psychological and economic value.” (Hassan, 2012)


The Importance of a Value Proposition

The value proposition communicates a business/brand’s most important reason someone should do business with you and not the competition.

How do you provide the most value?

This can provide a competitive advantage if done well.

It becomes a focus in our marketing and should always be prominent on the website and other customer touchpoints such as social media.

For many consumers, your value proposition is the first thing they encounter — so it should differentiate you from the competition.

However, many firms do not have one. According to HubSpot, only around 60 percent of businesses do. But a lot of businesses do not do it well which becomes a problem if customers then do not immediately understand the value of what you offer.

Many customers will research several options before making the purchase. A value proposition can help your business to stand out amongst these alternatives, be noticed and remembered.

An excellent value proposition helps potential customers to quickly understand how you uniquely provide value. If it is not immediately clear what you offer, you will likely be disregarded. The value proposition should target your ideal customers/market segment by identifying why your solution best fits their needs.

“These days, an elevated level of competition and rapid changes in the market and technology make it complex for a company to sustain momentum without focusing on deliver the value that customers require.” (Hassan, 2012)


Creating a Value Proposition

When creating our value proposition, we must define what we offer and explain how we provide a unique solution or benefit, best suited to meet a specific need of a specific group of customers.

First, we must identify all the benefits of our products or services, and what makes us different from the alternative options from competitors. Be as specific as possible when describing how this provides value, in an easily digestible way for the reader.

Strive to be too straightforward and the point — focus on clarity and the conciseness of your message.

You want the customer to understand your message, so avoid hype, marketing buzzwords and industry jargon.

“Identify the elements that make their offer superior in order to demonstrate, document and communicate them clearly to the targeted customers.” (Hassan, 2012)


It is also not your slogan or catchphrase. It is more than that.

A value proposition should target customers’ strongest decision-making drivers. To do this, we need to define how consuming our products or services are going to make their lives better and how their experience makes them feel.

Customers can have several motivations, including wants which are emotional drivers, rational needs, and fears which are about avoiding undesirable outcomes.

Focus on how customers define value. By connecting our value to the challenges of our target customer, the value proposition becomes clearer.


Research

Before writing our value proposition, we need to be truly clear on what customers we are targeting with our products or services.

Different customers perceive value differently. More than one component of a product or service adds value, such as price, quality or location. Therefore, we need a deep understanding of the market we are in, to help identify our target customers’ expectations, to best address their needs.

Market research - value proposition

Market research will help us understand what customers are looking for in the product or service that we offer and how they phrase their needs. A value proposition is written in our ideal clients/customer personas’ language, which can often be different to how we as the business would phrase it.

This helps us to determine the message that resonates best with our ideal customers and/or main buyer persona, so the right language is incorporated into the value

Some of the things we are trying to learn through market research are:

  • Who our target customers are?
  • What their values are
  • What their needs are
  • What their motivations are
  • What your competitors are lacking
  • What your product or service does better
  • Why this difference matters to customers
“…Whether the value propositions of a company’s business model correlate with the actual needs of the customers it wishes to serve.” (Osterwalder, Pigneur, Bernarda, & Smith, 2014)


Formatting a value proposition

The value proposition must answer what we offer, who is it for and how it is useful. It will usually follow a particular format, using a headline, sub-headline, and a short paragraph of text, with a visual.

A value proposition must have a strong and clear headline to grab the attention of customers. It summarises your key benefit to the customer in one sentence, so needs to be both clear and instantly credible.

The format for this could be “We help (X) do (Y) by doing (Z).”

The sub-headline is a 2–3 sentence paragraph. It is a specific explanation of what we do/offer, for whom it is for, and why it is useful. The final paragraph explains this more in-depth by outlining more about what you offer and why it is superior.

Key benefits or features are listed, often as bullet points for ease of reading.

An image can communicate much faster than words, so a visual such as a photo or hero image is another key component of our value proposition. A hero image is an oversized banned image a webpage that services user is the first glimpse of the company.

“An entire set of experiences, including value for money that an organization brings to customers. Customers may perceive this set or combination of experiences to be superior, equal or inferior to alternatives.” (Lanning, 1998)

 

Testing your value proposition

After the research and writing our value proposition, we should test it. Research has shown that half of the businesses do not optimise their value proposition. 

So how do they know if theirs is any good? 

Testing the effectiveness of your value proposition helps objectify the process a little.

As well as surveying customers or using a focus group, you might consider running A/B tests. You can test two alternative value propositions by driving traffic to two different landing pages. Targeted Facebook ads, Google ads or email marketing are an effective way of driving relevant targeted traffic to these landing pages.

If one page performs better than the other by generating more engagement and conversions, then this gives an objective answer for which is a better fit.

This process can be used several times to further hone your value proposition to improve results.


In summary, a value proposition is the summary statement of why a customer would choose a company’s product or service. It frames how they uniquely provide value to customers.

This article has discussed the importance of creating a value proposition and the steps a business can take to create their own, to differentiate themselves from the competitors.