If you’ve got twenty minutes of spare time, you should make yourself a really nice sandwich. But if that seems like a lot of effort, watching this video would also be a good choice. Morgan Spurlock, the guy from Super Size Me, gives a great talk that focuses on a more sneaky area of advertising; brand placement.
The talk really made me think about the way brand placements aren’t often fully registered while the rest of the action’s going on in a show or movie. I felt pretty disappointed with myself after not reacting more passionately to James Bond driving a Ford Mondeo in Casino Royale. You don’t just suddenly move your budget up from a Ford to an Aston Martin in the space of a few days, James, it’s just not realistic.
The talk really made me think about the way brand placements aren’t often fully registered while the rest of the action’s going on in a show or movie. I felt pretty disappointed with myself after not reacting more passionately to James Bond driving a Ford Mondeo in Casino Royale. You don’t just suddenly move your budget up from a Ford to an Aston Martin in the space of a few days, James, it’s just not realistic.
| You heard me, James. |
This sort of unconscious or quick processing of brand placements is what makes the content around it so important. Everything around the placement has to be congruent, positive, but still fairly inconspicuous, in terms of the genre, plot, characters, and specific content of wherever you want your placement to be. Otherwise, far more people would have had MacBooks on LOST. And that’s why almost nobody trusted poor old Morgan here, he couldn’t guarantee that his movie would be so likeable that it could create superficial associations between the content and the brands involved.
The more aware you are of a brand placement, the better you’ll be able to put up a resistance to its persuasion. The whole beauty of ‘em is that you don’t consciously register them for a long time, so you can barely even tell the difference after you’ve been persuaded. Advertising researchers often use ‘implicit’ measures on their guinea pigs to find that people may change their behaviour to favour or buy a certain brand, but at the same time these people might not be able to explain why or what persuaded them to change. You’ll probably be surprised the next time your watching your favourite show, or even playing a video game, at the amount of brand placements hidden in there. Some of them will be placed brilliantly and catch you off guard (Big Mac), while others might be placed by a team of the finest that advertising has to offer, like the one at 8:50 in the video.
