Product Placement

Product Placement

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, advertising is “the techniques and practices used to bring products, services, opinions, or causes to public notice for the purpose of persuading the public to respond in a certain way to what is advertised.” Advertising developed from word of mouth, signs on the streets, commercials on the radio and television, endorsements by celebrities, pop-ups on the internet, and now to the latest trend, product placement. Product placement is the deliberate yet natural use of particular products in movies, video games, books, pictures, songs, or on the radio by actors, models, characters, singers, or celebrities in order to increases awareness of the product. The birth of product placement came about with digital technology. Digital recording allows viewers to watch television while skipping commercials effortlessly. Thus, advertisers began product placement. The use of product placement and the funds generated from it have increased significantly. The growing trend of product placement is problematic because it is unethical.

Generally, product placement occurs in exchange for either free sample products or payment. When monetary compensation is given, product placement becomes an unfair journalism practice that does not clearly divide editorial content from advertising. Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University, believes product placement already "is routine in some of the fashion magazines, because they are the quintessential corrupt publications," that fog the differences between advertising and editorial content. A recent and widely known example of product placement is the New Yorker and their Target advertisements. Target bought the rights to become the New Yorker’s sole advertiser for the August 22nd issue. Additionally, the ads did not look like ads; they were artistic illustrations with variations of the Target bulls-eye logo and did not even mention the company name. The public negatively received the Target ads because the New Yorker is one of the most prestigious magazines in the U.S. Waterman wrote an article in the Miami Herald over the shocking issue stating that “What The New Yorker issue offered was the seamless integration of a peddler's promotional imagery into the most prestigious editorial environment US periodical publishing has to offer."

Product placement is inherently deceptive. The purpose of product placement is to advertise subtly by hiding the fact that it actually is an advertisement. According to the Commercial Alert, the Ralph Nadar inspired watchdog group, advertisers are so effective at making product placements natural, that many people do not even realize they are advertisements. For example, if the characters from the TV show Scrubs on NBC were gathered together at lunchtime drinking Pepsi, viewers would most likely assume that the characters are merely drinking a universally popular drink. They would fail to recognize that this is an example of product placement. It is not a mere coincidence that the characters are drinking Pepsi. The characters are drinking Pepsi to advertise it. In fact, product placement has become so popular that almost every single product used even merely has its brand shown for a brief period of time, is product placement. This include, characters eating at McDonald’s, shopping at a particular store, drinking a bottled water, driving a certain car, wearing an Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt, reading a certain book, listening to a certain artist, etc. Consumers need to be able to recognize what are ads and what are not ads (Lamb, pg. 1).

It is problematic that something so unethical as product placement is popular and effective. In the first nine months of 2004, 8,000 occurrences of product placement were recorded on network TV alone (Sutherland, pg. 2). Dr. Max Sutherland, a psychologist and international marketing consultant, explains that product placement works because the media sets the mental agenda