The product placement should grow up at the same time with the “Placement Planner”: the professional figure (adviser or agency) that studies any possible occasion for product placement, analyses, evalues and proposes them to his/her clients on the base of their profile, budget and aim. Well the bad news is that in Italy this does not happen as the Placement Planner does not exist. Really the chances to plan placements within shows, serials, movies, clips and videogames both in Italy as well abroad are concrete…it is only managed in quite an uncoordinated way, sometimes just supported by a PR activity or a few more. No structure is able to gather all the placement possibilities to propose them in a well-integrated planning of product placement that can use more productions as well more means. The other evening I was watching the Olympic Games and above all the curling game between Swiss and Danemark. Curling is a new and pleasant sport (a sort of bowling on ice): during the last edition in Turin many people have begun to appreciate this sport quite chic without being snob (as the Polo). Well I noticed two things during that game. The first is that there are quite a good number of updated fans; the other is that in a month there will be the World Men’s Curling Championship here in Italy… in Cortina to be precise. Unfortunately it is too late to think to exploit such an occasion to do some product placements; but if there had been a work of coordination, the organisers would have gathered funds not only through sponsorships but even through this channel. And the Companies would have been pleased….that night moreover, quite a quarter of an hour was dedicated to the make-up of the nice Danish athletes plus an unimprecise number os minutes to explain the technical equipment and more. An event, such as the World Championship, can be coonected to an incredible range of secondary initiatives, promotion activities and more, speaking in terms of placement big “windows” of great interest. I believe there will need time but the product placement will pass through the Planning Planner sooner or later.

For long time a comedy by Disney “When in Rome” has been spoken about; it should be a modern copy of “Vacanze Romane”. The movie title has been borrowed by an aphorism of S.Ambrogio, extremely famous even in the Anglosaxon countries with the translation of “When in Rome, Do as Romans Do”. A suggestion to behave like the people who live in Rome when in Rome. Probably the Production has well accepted the suggestion as the coming out of the movie has been postponed from September to next January. But the most nice curiosity is another one. Almost one year ago, during the shooting of a service dedicated to the movie in New York, the famous programme of CBS “Entertainment Tonight” , interviewed the actors on the set at Central Park. The atmosphere was very friendly, people joked in front of the camera, choking and opening a huge umbrella. The umbrella was not sponsorised by Pepsi or Coca but it had been furnished by an Italian Gourmet Company that through this has obtained great visibility of its brand, as big as the screen during a share of 12 millions of people. As many as during a football match. By sure a very lucky strike that derives from a precedent product placement action. In the movie there are 18 of such an umbrellas, placed here and there throughout Central Park. An idea of the product placement Agency that has followed and sustained this Italian Company and that was well appreciated by the producers of the movie, thus becoming part of this curious and nice Italo-American comedy.