Product Placement

Earlier this month culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw announced a three-month consultation on lifting the ban on product placement in British television programmes.

Despite product placement being worth $7bn a year in the US, there has been relatively little research into not only how, but if it works. A few months ago I contacted Dr Susan Auty at Lancaster University who, (prior to her retirement in July), studied the effects of product placement on consumer choice.

I found it very difficult to believe that after sitting through Quantum of Solace anyone would be compelled to buy an Aston Martin DBS, or fly Virgin Atlantic. Dr Auty’s research suggests that in the short-term brand awareness and associations are formed, however long-term effects on actual choice is still a very grey area.

Dr Auty notes an experiment where children watched a clip from Home Alone in which Pepsi Cola featured prominently. A control group were shown a similar clip featuring non-branded products. The children were then invited choose a drink of either Pepsi or Coke at the outset of the individual interviews to asses how much detail of the clip they could recall.

The results were very interesting. The UK market average split between Coke and Pepsi is 75:25. The control group was 58:42 and the test group were 38:62. So the group shown the branded clip made a significantly different choice of drink than expected, that said as the research suggests previous exposure affects choice and the effects of recent exposure diminish overtime.

A recent episode of Derren Brown’s latest series The Events covered something called ‘Perception Without Awareness’. In the show, Derren asked a woman to pick out any toy in Hamleys before not only showing he’d known what she was going to pick from the very start, but also showing how he’d influenced her choice by the use of giraffes symbols, and motifs throughout the shop, and using suggestive language like “up” and “tall”.

Adrian North, David Hargreaves and Jennifer Mckendrick, (Dr Auty’s colleges at Lancaster University), found that when French music was played in a wine shop, 77% of the wine sold that day was French. When German music was played 73% of the wine sold on that day was German. 86% of the customers said categorically that the music did not affect their choice.

It’s clear that people are suggestible, and can be induced to do or think things without being aware of it, (if this wasn’t the case, Derren Brown wouldn’t have a show). But does seeing a product or brand in a television program really influence us that much? Apple Mac computers featured prominently in Seinfeld and Sex in the City, and if you see a computer being used in a film generally it’ll be a iMac, yet Apple still have less than 10% of the market share.

A spokesman for Mediawatch UK, (formerly the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association Mary Whitehouse Association of Tedious Nutters), was quoted in the Guardian:

We shouldn’t be using television programmes to push a product. We’re not saying no to all product placement, but broadcasters need to be responsible about which audiences they’re selling to and what. Self-regulation isn’t working. Do we really want to go down the American road where you’re bombarded constantly?

Given that product placement will upset Mediawatch it automatically goes up in my estimation. Will product placement in British television programmes make any difference? Well it could raise £125m annually for the industry, and possibly save ITV, (something I feel isn’t needed and ITV should die a quiet death). But I really don’t think it is anything to worry about, and I doubt Phillip Schofield eating a Mars bar on This Morning will make me run to the newsagent and handover 80p or whatever hellish price a Mars bar costs now.