ADVERTISING IN NEW PLACES

ADVERTISING IN NEW PLACES

In recent years advertisers have had to scramble harder and harder to attract and keep our attention. Although ads seem to be everywhere, we have more technology to delete or subdue them (e.g., muting or fast-forwarding videos, using delete keys and spam filters for e-mail ads). In response, the advertisers have become more and more clever in placing ads in places we can’t ignore, sometimes even in places where we don’t realize they are ads. This section of the chapter looks at several of these.

Product Placements

When your favorite actor in a TV show or movie drinks a Pepsi, smokes a Marlboro, or uses a Sony Walkman, is the choice of a brand coincidental? Hardly. The manufacturer has probably paid thousands of dollars through a placement agent or somehow contributed to the film or TV show as part of a deal to have those products used. For example, Nokia paid to have Jennifer Aniston use one of their cellular phones in Friends and producers of The Saint actually shot after the film wrapped and used several scenes featuring Volvo’s latest model, in response to Volvo’s offer of an ad campaign that promoted the car and the film together (Gornstein, 1997), Ramses Condoms paid over $10,000 to feature its product in Lethal Weapon II, while Safetex paid around $15,000 to have Julia Roberts pull a Gold Circle condom out of her boot while sitting on Richard Gere’s desk in Pretty Woman (J.R.Wilson & Wilson, 1998). James Bond films are some of the most blatant and ubiquitous uses of product placements, including Visa card, Avis car rental, Smirnoff vodka, Ericsson cell phones, British Airways, Omega watches, Heineken beer, L’Oreal makeup, and Mercedes automobiles (Rimmer, 2002). The reality-based TV shows like Survivor and American Idol have brought product placement to new heights, with their many scenes of the “cast” using the products.

Often the payment for such positioning is more subtle than a flat fee for appearance of the product. For example, Plantronics placed its headsets in

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Minority Report and Die Another Day in 2002 by paying “marketing dollars” for costs toward promotion of the film (Rimmer, 2002). This way film advertising, trailers, and merchandising can promote both the product and the film at the same time.

Do product placements work? After Elliott used Reese’s Pieces to lure the alien from his hiding place in the family’s backyard in E.T. in 1982, sales of the candy increased by 65%. Mars had initially declined an offer to use M&Ms in this role (Rimmer, 2002). Although there has not yet been a lot of research on effects of product placements, one study showed research participants a 20-minute clip from the movie Die Hard, where the lead character either smoked or did not smoke; those who saw him smoking found him more appealing than those who saw the nonsmoking clip (Gibson & Maurer, 2000).

Variations on product placement are becoming more numerous and more creative. In 2002, cosmetics giant Revlon cut a deal with ABC to have a part on three months of the soap opera All My Children, where the story line had

a protagonist spying on a rival firm (Eisenberg, 2002). The digitally animated movie FoodFight! features a supermarket coming to life, where the “good brands” like Twinkie the Kid, Charlie the Tuna, Mrs. Butterworth, and Mr. Clean battle the evil “brand-X” products for control of the store (Eisenberg, 2002).

There are even product placements within other ads (Elliott, 2002b). For example, a Toyota ad featured a Sony Vaio laptop computer inside the car to highlight its feature of a 110-volt outlet inside the car, at the same time burnishing the prestige of both products. Sometimes the juxtaposition can be more humorous for purposes of attracting attention. For example, Chevrolet featured a TV commercial with the two “lonely Maytag repairmen” cruising around in a Chevrolet.

Guests on talk shows may even be product placements of a sort. For example, drug companies sometimes pay celebrities like Lauren Bacall, Kathleen Turner, or Rob Lowe for pushing their products on talk shows (Eisenberg, 2002). Sometimes these guest appearances were not noted as paid appearances.

Is there an artistic or ethical problem with product placements? If the script, the blocking, and the editing are driven by motivation to show a product rather than artistic and script-driven concerns, there may be a compromise of artistic quality. Particularly troubling is the case of the modeling of the use of unhealthy or dangerous products, such as tobacco or alcohol. For example, although instances of smoking on U.S. TV are very low (far lower than the 25% or so of the population who smoke), smoking is far more common in movies and its incidence has not fallen in the last forty years. Much of this difference is attributed to product placement of tobacco in movies.

123 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

Classrooms and Schools

As school districts and universities become increasingly financially strapped, they are turning to private industry to provide funds that public entities do not have. One sort of arrangement is the sales contract where a school agrees to exclusively sell one brand of soft drink, for example, on its campus for some period of time in return for a substantial sum. For example, one university concluded a contract with Pepsico to sell only Pepsi drinks on campus in return for $5 million dollars for the university library. At a time when journal subscriptions and library hours were being cut, $5 million dollars was a big help.

Public schools have long had corporate tie-ins, like the Pizza Hut BookIt campaign, where an elementary school child receives a coupon for a free Personal Pan pizza from Pizza Hut if they complete an agreed-upon number of pages of reading per month. Sometimes if everyone in the class meets the requirements, the whole class gets a pizza party at the end of the semester. Children are encouraged to read, and Pizza Hut socializes a new generation of customers for its restaurants.

Sometimes there are required sales quotas to actually receive the money. For example, a Colorado Springs, Colorado school district was somewhat behind on its agreement with Coke to sell 1.68 million bottles of Coke products. Not wanting to risk losing the $8 million, 10-year contract, the district administrator moved vending machines to more accessible areas, encouraged principals to allow drinking Cokes in class, and generally exhorted staff and students to drink more Coke products as a way to support their school (Labi, 1999).

Advertising has become a fact of life in schools. School buses sell advertising space, high school athletic scoreboards have ad panels, students watch the commercials on daily news summaries on Channel One or CNN Headline News, and Taco Bell and Pizza Hut sell their products in the school cafeteria (Wartella & Jennings, 2001).

Sometimes ad money can go to other good uses. The bottled-water maker Evian refurbished a run-down public swimming pool in the London suburb of Brixton and tiled the bottom with its brand name, which just happens to

be highly visible for passengers arriving and leaving from nearby Heathrow Airport (Eisenberg, 2002).

Advertisers are forever finding new places to put ads; see Box 4.8 for some of the newest and most creative.

Advertising on the Internet

One of the fastest growing areas of advertising is the Internet, although that has provided some challenges to marketers as well (Schumann & Thorson,

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sites tend to be as annoying as they are ubiquitous. The more salient they are, the more annoying. The ads that pop up and are hard to get rid of risk alienating the potential market, yet the advertiser has to get people’s attention. The most explosive growth of ads on the Internet in recent years has come in the form of spam, or e-mail advertising, which grew almost 1900% in the U.S. between 2002 and 2003 alone, to 4.9 trillion pieces of mail (Taylor, 2003), Many of these are for cheap loans, weight-loss products, Viagra and other drugs, computer cartridges, and most distressingly, breast- and penis-enlargement products, pornography, and solicitation of sexual encounters. How to screen out the spam has been a major challenge of e-mail providers and programs in recent years. Some are even questioning whether the huge volume of spam will soon begin to make e-mail not worth the trouble (Sullivan, 2003).