Product placement

The culture that is prevalent in America is saturated with the commercials, images, and plugs for almost every consumer good available. It is so ingrained in to our culture that it often goes unnoticed by the conscious mind; that is not necessarily a good thing though, as that is one of the ways advertisers target consumers. Even the music industry has cashed in on the product placement with brand names embedded in songs, or even songs designed completely around getting a consumer to purchase specific products or brands. Music videos that are displayed on stations such as MTV and BET depict situations most people would love to be in, and in those images there are specific brands of goods that people assume will lead them to a life such as that one. Every day consumers are bombarded with almost fifteen minutes of commercial, program promos, and public service announcements, per one hour of network television. In addition they are subjected to almost eleven minutes of product placement (Campbell, Martin, & Fabos, 2013, pg. 321). With such an aggressive marketing strategy, almost half of the time spent watching popular programming is in fact some sort of product advertisement. The modern day practice of product placement is the advertising practice of strategically placing products in movies and TV shows so the products appear as part of the scene, and seem to be integrated into story. This subtly calls attention to the object, and relates that brand name to something the consumer enjoys. It has become such a highly practiced process that it was a $3.8 billion dollar industry in film and television alone in 2005 (Malek, 2005). It has evolved to the point where almost every show contains product placement, and some even contain staggering amounts of incidences per episode. For example, the FOX network show American Idol featured over 4,600 instances of product placement