More than one, speaking with some colleagues and Clients, they have asked which is the best way for the development of product placement projects.
Still being a very young sector in Europe, it’s quite a right question. Though the answer is not the expected one. One can rightly think that for this kind of service the best support should be the media planner or the advertising agencies. Both these organisations manage different Clients and should know, in theory, their aims and necessities so to able to propose the right and more efficacious product placement. But it’s not like this, though last week an article on the Economist affirmed exactly the contrary. What happens in more mature markets like USA and Canada, it’s what happens here as in Bollywood as well.
The product placement agencies do not have any kind of support or collaboration by this traditional marketing operators so they have direct relations with the Clients. The result is good though a little bit more difficult. Product Placement always means activities of PR, ads, events, etc. So that the Agency is involved but only in a second time so it’s no more able to help the Client with its knowledge and creativity. Some Clients have already understood how things should go, so they put in contact their PR or the press agency with the product placement one. The results obtained from this collaboration are generally very good (for what concerns my experience). I really believe that if the ads agencies perceived product placement as an efficacious instrument, and not like a competitor, the development of this sector would be huge.
p.s. I will be on travel for a week…. I will update with new post by next Thursday…
