In the web site www.emarketer.com a few statistics have been published with the comparison between the social network use, in the last two or three years, and its users generation. This is an important element even for those who employ product placement as it shares quite well its public on the base of age and behaviour. This should involve anybody interested in marketing but in our case even more as the web is one of the most evident and strong attraction for product placement. Still nowadays, lots of Companies have problems when planning how to value at its best any TV or movie passage, as in all Europe there are enough legal gaps about product placement: until a few years ago they tried to hinder the placement on the base of a very restrictive interpretation of the laws and not to promote it. On the contrary, once you have got a placement you can do lots of interesting things/actions. One, for example, is to analyse th statistics here above to study your chances of visibility within the social networks more similar to your marketing strategies and brand profile.
For sure there is a format well developed in the TV entertainment world, the wine and food one.There is the serial by the young international creative chef (Jamie Oliver); the Tv report in the week-end with chefs, sommelliers and famous critics (Vissani, Luca Maroni ecc.), the semiprofessional and deepening one (New Work by Laura Ravaioli) and those for people who have few time but lots of passion (Nigella Express). Even on the radio there are wine and food programmes (Decanter) or weekly appointments with interesting proposals for the week-end always connected to food. The web, especially, is full of sites about the good table, or video portals with huge amounts of channels for cooking class and degustation, more or less interesting from a quality point of view. For different reasons none of them have ever approached the product placement. The professional productions maybe considering this like a conflict of interest, the minor and independent ones not so interested in the Companies that have potentially proposed themselves. On this base, the project “Five stars Pans”, nominee at the “7 plots for 7 brands” competition presents something new as it has been thought eaxctly for the web and the product placement. Let’s thing about a video on demand, divided into subjects, very short and easy for anybody through the web. The set could be any real or creative location and the placement declinations will go from furniture to kitchenware to wine and food products .
Few good ideas have begun to arrive about the prize “7 productions for 7 products” we talked about a month ago. In its official version it will be almost sure that its name will be “7 plot for 7 brands”. We have to say that there will not be just one winner as prizes and medals are not its aim.Its aim in fact is to point out good ideas to propose to Companies interested in planning new product placements. The web serial budgets are so low that the brands that invest become microproducers and can manage their product/webserial even following their own strategies (through their own web company, on facebook page, youtube or metcafe, DVD mobile or selling the format to some digital stations).
And within this scenery the project “Borderman” is really a great interpretation. First of all, it is not a traditional web serial, it is not just the translation of a sit-com on the web but something new called “multiformat” as it is divided into 5 sections, one after the other, about the same subject. Thanks to this, Borderman is a perfect project for product placement, keeping its plot characteristics as well as awakening the public interest. The Companies more interested in this project should be those about sports clothing and accessories, the more casual brands, and those that get around the “Indi” music. Considering its meagre investment and its planning ductility, it is a chance really full of potentialities.
Even if it works only in the USA (for the moment), just after two years from its birth, it is the video portal more visited after youtube (for the moment) with its 38 millions of visitors.
ButHulu doen’t work like youtube, we can say it belongs to another generation, as it allows to share and persolize its subjects and contents as well as to satisfy the requirements and important aims (money, profit, earnings) of the major companies.
Here it is: Hulu has an agreement with the most important American Broadcast Companies (NBC;, FOX, E’, Comedy Central, etc) and with the most important Studios (Universal, 20th century, MGM, etc) for the distribution of their products. It’s sufficient to choose the serial, the Show (often live broadcasted) or the movie you prefer and download it. But I believe what’s really interesting and new in its kind is the chance, once downloaded the movie, to modify as you wish and reintroduce it on the web again.
The media planners and the product placers often exploit the movies and the serials for about 7 years but, considering the process of reniewing that some of them undergo by the visitors, we can imagine their life cycle to double. In the last years something similar has happened even in Italy with the dubbing in some regional dialects of a few episodes of Happy Days or other movies such as “An Officer and a Gentleman”, “Rambo”, etc. Hulu starts from the same principle, developing it hugely and giving new life, sometimes more creativity and appeal to many movie feature films. Sometimes even the product placements have been aimed to with the results, almost always positive to offer verbal mention and more fame to the brand, even if this was not the real intent of the “handler”.
The Wall Street Journal had already perceived this when a few days ago in an article by the journalist Suzanne Vranica, it published about the news atHSN.
HSN is a multichannel (TV, Web, paper catalogue) completely dedicated to the fashion shopping, furniture, personal accessories and other gadgets mostly feminine. To speak openly, a phenomenon with a paying public of about 94 millions of people. With the new season, started this Autumn, HSN (Home Shopping Network) has decided to find out new economical resources to pay its own developing projects. Not an easy thing if you consider that, for clear reasons of coherence and seriousness, the channel has never asked for any kind of ads. The solution thought by the management has been the product placement. A choice able to preserve the credibility of the brand and, at the same time, to find out financial helps through the brand integration. Among the most important examples of the network startegy, the WSJ underlines the one about Barilla (we even knew about Kraft), become “owner” of a cook programme during which it gives pieces of advice about new recipes or better ones ‘own. After the first month of trial, the marketing sector of the channel has sent out all its commercial agents all over the world to promote such a chance. The offer is quite interesting for different brands both in Italy as well as in Europe, that would have the chance to become visible as technical sponsor (thus in a coherent contest) in a very short time to a huge public of mostly 100 millions of people.
I would like to point out at your attention a portal for all the TV-movie lovers. Www.sharetv.org has almost 2000.000 subscribers and special resources. In practice a forum for discussion about any serial and cartoons of the present and the past (each with thousands of subscribers), updated news both on the productions as well as on the celebrities., the whole Tv scheduling divided into Countries (actually USA, Canada, Great Britain, Australia and Japan), a link dedicated to the Shows and obviously a newsletter to which you can freely subscribe. But the real treasure is the link to “watch on line”: more than 10.000 TV serial episodes of any kind and period, in alphabetical order, from A-Team to X-men passing through real pearls like Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Charlie Brown and the Snoopy Show, Kojak, besides most of the last generation serials. The web site has even its own Facebook and Twitter declination, that probably help to develop more widely the project and to admit new lovers.
About one week ago I wrote about product placement in the web.An interesting and recent “case history” by Rebook, a video diffused on May the 23rd to promote the new football shoes, has as main characters Thierry Henry (Barça) e Ryan Giggs (Manchester United). The two players have infact worn these shoes during the final match in Rome.
In the video there are co-placements too (mobile and laptop by apple), maybe exchanged for a link popularity consulting. The plot relates the challenge through jokes between the two players with “Anything you can do, I can do better” as background music.
