Product placement works best in combination with ads

Using 30-second ad slots in tandem with product placement can significantly increase key metrics, from sales to website visits, according to research. 

A study* by BEN, a firm working in the product placement field, tied ad and product integration exposure to brands to actions taken by consumers within the following two weeks. Marketing Brew detailed the highlights.

Takeaways

• Doritos, with a product placement within The CW drama Riverdale, saw a 61% lift in sales among audiences who saw both a TV commercial and a product placement in the series – that was almost twice the 37% lift in sales resulting from audiences who only saw the TV commercial. 
• A cereal brand with a product placement in the CBS series Mom saw a 53% lift in sales among audiences who saw both a TV commercial and a product placement – more than 3x higher than the 13.5% lift from a TV commercial alone.
• An auto brand that advertised on ABC didn’t see any increase in website visits through TV commercials alone, but saw an 8% lift in website visits when audiences saw both ad and product integration. 

Why it matters

Apart from the greater effectiveness of combining ad and product placement, there are two other factors to consider. One is that product placement and media are frequently handled by different teams – there is scope for them to work more closely together. The second is that planning for such an outcome needs to be stepped up as such opportunities will only increase when Netflix and Disney+ deliver ad-supported offerings to run alongside their subscription products. 

A flexible future?

The world of product placement is a complicated one involving all sorts of potential trade-offs for content producers in terms of scripts and financing. Those could conceivably become a bit simpler – or at least different – if Amazon’s experiment with a beta version of “virtual product placement” proves successful. 

*Methodology: BEN and TV measurement and analytics firm 605 compared results from cereal, snack, and automotive brands that ran ads on CBS, The CW, and ABC, and which also had product placement in the CBS comedy Mom, the CW drama Riverdale, or the ABC late-night series Jimmy Kimmel Live, respectively. The study compared four audiences: viewers who saw at least two seconds of a brand’s linear ad; viewers who saw the brand’s product integration but no ad; viewers who saw both a linear ad and the same brand’s product integration; and viewers who saw neither ads nor product integrations. BEN also tracked products those audiences purchased within two weeks of the integration airing, using shopping data from Catalina; it also tracked audience visits to brand websites using data from LiveRamp.

Sourced from Marketing Brew, New York Times