Product Placement Essay

The following seminar paper deals with the question to which extent product placement influences or affects daily business in the television and movie sector. Due to the fact that ordinary commercials become more and more unpopular to the modern consumer and a fundamental change in the consumption of media, hidden advertisement gains attrac-tiveness and as a result, different commodities have to be integrated in every day life.
Pay-TV, DVB-T and new image devices simplify the avoiding of classical sales promotion and correspondingly, the advertiser is confronted with a grave situation, therefore he ne-cessarily needs to find a solution. Considering the fact that the modern consumer is over-flooded with commercials every day, appealing advertisement attains denuation. Cornwell describes this as “mass media advertising [...] is on it’s deathbed”1. Enterprises progressi-vely look for recent ways to alter their promotion with a view to accomplish the user in a new way.
Product Placement is a contented topic that affects not only the industry but also different advertising agencies as well as movie- and television-producers and eventually the con-sumer. The industry, using this type of advertising, complains about the difficulty to mes-sure the effects induced by product placement and therewith the cost-benefit analysis. Advertising agencies need to procure this style of promotion into their portfolio as well as the movie- and television-producing industry considerates the commercialization of dra-matic work which is caused by the placement of various commodities. Otherwise, one should mention that product placement breeds a cut of costs for the producer of any mo-vie or TV show. Consequently the industry plus the media is bound to take a stand.
1 Cornwell, Bettina (2008): State of the Art and Science in Sponsorship-linked Marketing, page 41-55
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2 Theoretical Basis
2.1 Definitions
2.2 History
Although the term “Product Placement” seems pretty new, the issue of placing brand log-os or special products in the consuming media purposely is a phenomenon that already arose in Germany in the 1930s. Fashion designers tried to outfit celebrities with their new creations and automotive manufacturers sold their cars at a good price to persons who were very likely to be seen on TV. In cinema, the first placements took place in the early 1950s. One example might be the movie “Und ewig rauschen die Wälder”, where the fore-runner of the chocolate nowadays called “Milka” played a leading part. 2
Nevertheless, product placements were marginal at that time. Primary, when the televi-sion industry started to use this kind of marketing instrument in the early 1980s, it became more and more popular to producers and investors as well. Some of the first TV-series using this strategy as a new way of financing the project were “Traumschiff” and “Schöne Ferien”. But only some years later – in the mid-eighties – the rate of product placements in German television productions increased so rapidly that the audience and public TV-channels rejected this trend. Out of this aversion many movies or series were cut in length or censored like one movie of the famous comedian, Otto Waalkes,

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