Product placement and the creative industries

Nick | 09 Mar 2009, 09:00

In 2007, the world’s biggest advertiser, FMCG company Procter & Gamble started in-game advertising, partnering with Criterion Games to feature their brands in Burnout Paradise. They made the move after detailed research showed that not only was the medium one of the most effective ways to reach the young male consumer, but that players would accept brands in their games as long as the brand felt like it had a legitimate place in the world that had been created. After all, the gamers said, brands are virtually inescapable in real life, so their absence from a virtual world makes the game seem less real. The challenge is to integrate the brands seamlessly in the narrative.

This challenge is the same in TV and film. A television character walking in to a pub and asking for a pint of generic lager is one of the fastest ways to remind the viewer that these are just actors on a set. Yet few scenes in film history have jarred more than the scene in I Robot, when the camera lingers lovingly on Will Smith’s Converse trainers as he extols their virtues. Both approaches insult the viewers’ intelligence, but brands undoubtedly have a role in fiction, as they do in life.  Product placement also plays a key role in supporting the creative economy and is an industry worth $4.38 billion (2007) worldwide. With advertisers such as P&G forging partnerships with record labels and with writers such as Patricia Cornwell happy to engage in cross-promotion of another’s work, it’s clear that creatively and economically, product placement will have an increasingly important role to play in the creative economy.

It was with this trend in mind that Sir Michael Grade, Executive Chairman of ITV, wrote an article (following an announcement that the broadcaster would be shedding 600 jobs and disposing of a range of business units) in which he argued for a rethink on product placement regulations:

“And when the government could deregulate in line with the rest of Europe - say, on product placement - the secretary of state pre-empts his own consultation by saying he is opposed to UK broadcasters benefitting from this source of revenue. If this is consumer protection, why are US programmes containing product placement - Desperate Housewives and 24 to name but two - allowed on British screens at all?“

Product placement is already multi-billion dollar reality and it is at the heart of many new business models in the creative economy. How to balance the interests of the consumer with the interests of business on this issue will be a key challenge for c&binet to consider.