Palm Trees and Product Placement

By Tarah Heupel | May 13, 2010

Last week, as Rapid City was pounded with rain, snow, and blistering winds (in early May, no less), our fearless leader ventured south to attend the Alliance of Marketing Communications Agencies conference in West Palm Beach.

While Robert didn’t bring back sunshine or “I swam with dolphins” t-shirts for the worker bees, he did gift us with some conference nuggets that we’d love to share.

Takeaway #1: kids are smart.

Today’s tweens have grown up in the world of 24/7 advertising, where everything from their underpants to their morning cereal is a blatant advertisement for a movie superhero, cartoon character, or up-and-coming pop star. Tweens are exposed to so many messages in any given day that they’ve learned to tune out the noise, skipping commercials and ignoring movie previews altogether. So what’s a marketer to do?

Get smarter. Learn to craft messages that don’t look like the tried-and-true commercials everyone expects to see during the four-minute gaps in our favorite television programming. Creative product placement boosts credibility and top-of-mind awareness for your product, when mixed in a believable way.

Bank of America struck marketing gold when it announced a partnership to present History’s “America: The Story of Us” last month. The channel’s 12-hour miniseries is sprinkled with two-minute mini-documentaries detailing Bank of America’s role in American history. The mini-documentaries are shot and narrated in the same style as the series, blurring the line between programming and advertisement.

Other recently successful placements include the partnership between NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” and Subway; contestants visit a Subway restaurant in nearly every episode.  Lady Gaga made headlines for working in a bevy of products for her big-budget “Telephone” video, including Diet Coke cans (used as curlers) Virgin Mobile, Miracle Whip, and her own branded Heartbeats headphones, among others.

To make sponsorships and product placement work, especially for tweens, it’s important to make sure the product and the project fit together naturally. Find an angle that seems organic, not forced, and you just might get through to the smarty pants generation.

Stay tuned for more takeaways from Robert and the AMCA conference. And who knows, maybe he’s just waiting until later in the week to give us our t-shirts?

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