I think that product placement is useful to advertisers, but it is only of limited value in the TV value chain.
Product placement works for large national advertisers on new TV shows. Local advertisers can't embed their ads into the show. Furthermore, it breaks the rerun and international syndication approaches.
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Originally Posted by J. Strnad
First, you're right about some ads being very entertaining. But once you start fast-forwarding through the ads, you skip the good ones along with the boring ones. So making better ads doesn't really work as a tactic.
All that really works is product placement within the show itself. Once product placement becomes conspicuous, it becomes annoying. If it's annoying enough, people stop watching the program.
The next step is inserted ads within the program. We have them now with enlarged and extended "bullets" advertising other shows, though so far they're limited to the first few seconds of a program after the commercial break. If people put up with it, they'll appear in the middle of a show and eventually throughout the whole thing.
Maybe people will get so fed up with commercials they can't skip, they'll be willing to pay extra for what we think of as "normal TV shows" (non-HBO, etc.) without them.
For the foreseeable future, though, if there were a way to buy stock in product placement, that's where I'd put my money.
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