Product Placement

During class, we saw a part of the Britney Spears music video which featured many different brands and products in a more or less obvious way. In class we discussed that even if we don't remember exactly which product was shown in the video, it creates a lasting image in our implicit memory which causes us to identify the product and more likely select the product even though we don't really remember it.

In this post, I have included 2 examples of product placement, one of which is extremely obvious, and the other not so much.

The first one is this BudLight commercial, which makes it blatantly obvious that it is using product placement by even mentioning it in the very beginning. However, even though it is outrageous and almost annoyingly repeating the idea of product placement, I think it was still a very effective commercial. I think that viewers will recall a positive experience from watching this commercial and in turn have positive feelings towards BudLight the brand.

This second video is actually a Korean music video. The video is slightly explicit and I would only watch the first minute or so to understand the point.

What I thought was interesting about this was that there were two brands of beers featured in this MV: Budweiser and Heineken. I am kind of confused as to how both brands can be featured in the same music video. However, in the first minute or so, the images of the beers are visible in almost every scene. Most young adults who watch this MV are probably at KTV/noraebang and singing and dancing (in Asia) and when they see the beers, they will likely order the same drinks. Also, being a MV, it is meant to be watched more than once. I posted this video because the first time I saw this, I didn't really notice the brands of the beers, but the second time, I could not stop thinking about how much product placement the MV makers tried to include in the video.

Another product placement I noticed in this video was at 0:45. If you pause the video you will clearly see a box of Nature Valley's crunchy granola bar. This only appears in the MV once and it is very subtle, but I noticed it right away when I saw the video and I'm sure many other views did well. It was a very clever placement, which although subtle, seems to also be very effective in creating the implicit memeory.