How Much Is This Shot Worth

8/7/2019 How Much Is This Shot Worth

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How Much Is This Shot Worth?Research tools now measure the value of branded entertainment. So, how valuable are they?

In the dot-com era, there was a mania for linking Internet sales to TV based on a simple premise:Wouldn't it be cool if you could see Jennifer Aniston wearing a sweater on Friends and then--justlike that--log on to the Internet to buy it?

In 2005, Friends is ancient history and the industry is no longer preoccupied with sellingAniston's sweater. However, it is grappling with a related issue. If in the old days the questionwas how to buy the sweater, the new query is: What is the value of a scene in which it is worn?

The relevance of the question is the result of two major trends: the growth of product placementas a key component of marketing programs in a TiVo era; and the increasing pressure onbusinesses to show a return on investment for all marketing activities.

John Wanamaker once famously observed that 50% of the money spent on advertising is wasted,but no one can figure out which 50%. Now, the industry is "trying to make that a better equation," said Martyn Straw, chief strategy officer at BBDO, New York. "The marketinginvestment has, to a certain extent, been allowed to go down a black hole. Now you've gotpeople scrambling to generate growth, whether on the top line or the bottom line."

Previous attempts to estimate the value of product placement in television have been conductedinformally by dedicated placement agencies like NMA, Los Angeles, which has had a rankingsystem for years. Other firms provide measurement systems for product placement in films andvideogames.

As the TV deals have grown in size and scope, a cottage industry has formed to address the valuequestion in more concrete terms. Currently, several firms offer tools that rate product placementsin terms of both viewer impact, and dollars and cents. Though some marketers are using internalmeasurement systems, more are outsourcing the job to an independent agency.

General Motors is one of them. The automaker has enlisted the services of IntermediaAdvertising Group, New York, to gauge the effectiveness of its numerous placements, whichinclude a huge Pontiac giveaway Sept. 12 on The Oprah Winfrey Show and the ongoing GMCYukon Denali integration on Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

"We're going through a lot of effort to try to quantify placement and integration," said SteveTihanyi, general director of marketing alliances and regional operations at GM. "Not only do wetrack some major GM initiatives, but we track how we are comparing to others. One thing we doknow for certain is that the right kind of integration does have a significant positive impact."

Gisela Dawson, president of the Entertainment Resources Marketing Association, Los Angeles,said that initially, marketers were starstruck by getting their products onscreen. But now that it's


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more of a business, "most of our members have been looking for ways to quantify it," she said."We just don't know quite how to do it."

TV networks are eager for such tools because they would help generate an additional revenuestream, said Laura Caraccioli-Davis, svp at SMG Entertainment, Chicago. "They would love to

have Coke or Pepsi decide: will the [sitcom] family have Coke, or will they have Pepsi?"

She cautioned, however, that a standard measurement might lead to lower fees for productplacement. "Once you quantify [product placement], you will commodify it."

Chris Eames, svp-sales, sponsorship and marketing at Turner Broadcasting System, agreed. "It'sdifficult to create a standard. Clients have different goals and challenges going in," he said. "If you're Coke, you have 100% awareness, so just getting awareness isn't as valuable as it is for anew product launch. Those factors aren't put into a [third-party firm's] formula."

NUTS AND BOLTS: THE MEASUREMENTS

Given all the variables involved a placement--foreground or background, oral or visual, maincharacter or sidekick--developing an adequate methodology can be daunting. Whether there willultimately be a rate card or an exact value for a 20-second flash of Aniston's sweater is anyone'sguess. But that hasn't stopped the mobs of chart-toting researchers from making their case.

Among the firms is Nielsen Media Research (which, like Brandweek, is owned by VNU).Nielsen began monitoring prime-time programming for instances of product placement on the sixmajor networks in September 2003. Employees in Shelton, Conn., monitor every minute of shows and jot down instances where a brand gets screen time or a verbal mention. Theinformation is logged into a database where subscribers can search placements using various

criteria (brand, category, show, etc.), and then matched to the show's rating in that minute.Thus, a subscriber can see that on the Dec. 3, 2003 episode of The WB's The Gilmore Girls,Poland Spring bottled water got 85 seconds of screen time as the show was garnering a 2.2rating--i.e., 2.2% of the nation's 108 million households with TV sets were tuned in at thatmoment.

What may help to differentiate Nielsen's service is the company's sheer size: The firm hastracked 100,000 product placements since the fall of 2003.

Dave Harkness, svp-business development at Nielsen, said no one else has the manpower to

track and provide ratings for the vast number of TV placements. He envisions Nielsen's ratingsystem as an algorithm that could be automatically applied to 90% of placements. Thus, heargued, Nielsen's system would become the industry standard. "We'd like to take 90% off thetable," he said.

Still, Nielsen's service makes no attempt to parse the data or draw conclusions, and somemarketers may balk at those limitations.


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Chris Monaco, director of entertainment marketing at Allied Domecq, said he doesn't really carehow much air time his competitors are getting. "This isn't something where it's keeping up withthe Joneses," said Monaco, who has developed product placement deals for Domecq brandsStolichnaya, Malibu and Beefeater on Spike TV's new reality series The Club.

"Why should I care if [my competitors] are getting 10 times as many placements as us?" headded. "Who says a shotgun approach works in that situation?"

In response to such criticism, Nielsen is in the process of creating a tool that would produce aproduct placement rating. As a step toward establishing its methodology, the firm expects torelease a study next month analyzing the variables that increase viewer recall of productplacement. Harkness said he's briefed five of the major media-buying agencies and all haveexpressed interest. He declined to elaborate on the rating system, except to say that focus groupswill not be used.

Harkness expects that marketers, media agencies and others will continue to use their own

methods to attempt to find a value for placements. "I'm not sure there will be one definitivestandard," he said. "Agencies want some flexibility in the model."

Nielsen is not the only game in town. At least a dozen others have established unique methods of measuring product placement. They include BrandAdvisors (which measures film placements),NextMedium, Delivery Agent, Image Impact and Millward Brown. The "big three" at themoment, however, are Nielsen, iTVX and IAG.

New York ad agency Deutsch has partnered with iTVX, a New Rochelle, N.Y., firm thatcompares the value of a product placement to the cost of a 30-second ad through an elaborategrading system. Founder Frank Zazza is a product placement veteran who previously established

AIM Productions in Astoria, N.Y.Zazza fondly recalls the days when a handshake with a propmaster scored onscreen mentions for Junior Mints and Pez on Seinfeld--not to mention his greatest coup: Reese's Pieces' cameo in1982's E.T., considered by many observers as the birth of modern product placement.

"Product placement was relationship marketing with set decorators up until the early '90s," saidZazza. "It was beautiful. We'd do things with producers, set dressers . . ."

Times have changed. Media firms (OMD, MediaVest), product placement agencies (NMA),talent firms (William Morris) and reality producers including Mark Burnett (Survivor, The

Apprentice) and David Collins (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy/Girl) have all muscled in on theaction. "If you're a branding executive, you get five proposals--one from William Morris, onefrom your product placement agency," said Zazza. "It's the Wild West."

Zazza might have seen an end to his livelihood, but in fact saw an opportunity. Marketers, after all, want to have something to show for their placements. They especially want to know if theypaid too much to get their brand on According to Jim. As a rule of thumb, clients pay a relatively


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small fee--usually about $10,000 per month--as retainer to a placement agency. The dealsthemselves, of course, can run into the millions.

CAN YOU PUT A PRICE TAG ON THAT?

Regardless of how finely tuned the new measurement systems become, there will always bediffering opinions as to whether product placement gets a marketer bang for its buck. M&M's,for example, paid relatively little for its placement on E.R. in October 2002--a few thousanddollars at most, according to industry sources--yet Masterfoods executives were relativelyunhappy with the effort. In particular, they wanted to know why the bag was shown backwards.

According to Zazza, a 30-second ad during that timeslot would have cost $242,720. The totaltime that the characters talk about M&M's or are in the shot with the bag is about 30 seconds.Yet iTVX estimates that the placement was worth $430,613, or about 1.8 times the price of thead.

Why? This placement, which is divided into three segments, over-indexes on various parameters.The audio clarity is better than average and the awareness factor is high, meaning that someonewatching the show is more likely to remember it.

The awareness scale progresses from commercial TV to premium cable to IMAX, with the latter proving most memorable. ER apparently beats other prime-time shows on commercial TV in thisrespect. People also tend to remember a placement at the end of a show better than one at thebeginning.

Finally, iTVX takes into account the fact that the M&M's segment is self-contained and has abeginning, middle and end. The placement starts with Dr. Gregory Pratt (Mekhi Phifer) and Dr.

Jing-Mei "Deb" Chen (Ming-Na) sharing a moment by a vending machine. Pratt asks her, "Plainor peanut?" Chen responds, "Huh?" He clarifies: "M&M's." At the end of the segment, shefinally answers him. "I want plain M&Ms." He takes out the bag--he already chose the plain--andshe playfully taps him on the head with it.

All of this leads to a product placement/commercial cost ratio of 1.75, which, when multiplied bythe price of a spot during the show, results in the $430,613 valuation.

As another example, iTVx estimates that Procter & Gamble's integration of Crest on an earlysecond-season episode of The Apprentice has a PP/CC ratio of 10.8. The high rating arose in partfrom the fact that the placement had a beginning, middle and end (the brand appeared on-screen

for most of the hour) and was held by the main characters in the show.The episode featured a competition to see which team could best promote the launch of newCrest Whitening Expressions Vanilla Mint toothpaste. After one group entertained a few wildideas (such as pumping the New York subway system full of vanilla aroma), another conducted ademonstration with baseball's Mike Piazza during a sampling event.


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According to Zazza, P&G paid about $2.5 million for the deal. A 30-second ad would have cost$350,000 in that NBC timeslot. Given the PP/CC ratio, iTVX estimates the value of theplacement at $3.8 million. "They did very, very well," said Zazza.

The matrix that iTVX developed is one method of tackling the cost issue. Another is to measure

viewer response by asking audience members what they think.

That's the tack taken by IAG, which tracks audience response to marketing activities includingTV ads and sponsorships. About three years ago, marketers began asking co-CEO Alan Gouldabout measuring product placements.

Gould, who got into advertising by working on the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign, among others,said marketers are most interested in not screwing up. "It's like the Hippocratic oath," he said."First, do no harm."

That issue is addressed in what he calls the "fit" question: Did the placement fit--i.e., was it

delivered in an appropriate context? IAG counts on some 800,000 people to fill out onlinesurveys about their favorite shows. Though the firm dangles $5 and $10 coupons with which toreward respondents, Gould said most are happy to answer questions about those shows,including whether viewers recall the content of the show in addition to the specific brand.

In the case of IAG client American Express and its tie-in with NBC's first season of TheRestaurant, the "does it fit?" answer was no. The overcooked placement--which had chef RoccoDiSpirito intoning "get me the representatives for American Express Open"--was widely pannedand AmEx did not reappear during the second season. At the time, the company said that the firstseason worked for Open because it involved starting up a business, and expressed satisfaction inthe deal.

Gould said that other brands have received low "fit" scores, but nevertheless considered theplacement successful. The key, he said, is that the placement achieves its marketing objectives.P&G, for example, may not be too concerned if the Vanilla Crest/Apprentice tie-in were toachieve a low score if its marketers were chiefly concerned about building awareness for thebrand, which, in all likelihood, it did.

That's a sentiment echoed by many. The object of a placement, after all, could be to build buzzfor a new product or reposition an existing brand. Still, marketers often come into a placementdeal looking specifically for air time.

"They want to know: 'how many seconds [will my brand get]?'" said Robert Reisenberg, CEO of Full Circle, New York, an Omnicom unit charged with developing and producing TV programsto meet the needs of advertisers. "But when you sit them down and tell them it doesn't work thatway, they're responsive."

DIY MEASUREMENTS


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Even as they look to outside help, marketers are trying to become more sophisticated aboutmeasuring product placement. Boost Mobile, the teen-focused wireless firm, uses a five-pointscale to determine whether a placement makes sense, though it is also soliciting bids for a third-party product placement agency.

Tricia Bouzigard, senior entertainment marketing manager at Boost Mobile, said she uses achecklist that includes reach, sales-driving opportunities and other goals to evaluate the brand'sefforts, which include placement on MTV's car makeover show Pimp My Ride. "Clearly, [theshow] is our target audience," she said. "It's people taking it to the next level in their lives."

Whether the strict placement/commercial cost ratio developed by iTVX and others becomes astandard, many observers argue that allowing for those other variables is important.

"Having your brand written into the script is more effective than just having your brand sittingthere in a shot," noted Kristin Petersen, whose new role as vp-brand exposure and promotions atThe Gap signals the retailer's intent to bring a higher profile via branded entertainment to its

stores, including Old Navy and Banana Republic."Part of this is intuitive," added Eric Korsh, chief operating officer at Scout, producer of theQueer Eye shows. "Creatively, you understand when it's a good placement. It's gut instinct."

Allied Domecq's Monaco cautioned that marketers should ask whether the placement uses thebrand in a credible manner--and meets its long-term marketing strategies. Invariably, he believesdoing placements involves a leap of faith.

"In some ways, it can be measured, but in other ways, it has to be something that's done becauseyou believe in it," he said. "If you don't believe in it, you might as well be running regular TV

spots."When's the F-Word Good for Your Brand? When Tony Soprano Says It

Product placement may be more of an art than a science. What works and what doesn't? Dependson whom you ask. Rather than create our own ratings, we decided to leave the assessments to thebranding and entertainment experts. Below are some of their opinions on the best and worstproduct placements.

JACK TROUT president of Trout & Partners, Greenwich, C onn.

The best was James Bond driving around in [his] BMW, which underscored that the BMW is theultimate driving machine. That's probably as good as you're going to get.

The worst? Nothing really sticks in my mind. The problem with product placements is you missa lot of them. It's like wallpaper; it just sort of fades into the background.

MIT C H KANNE R partner at The Firm, Los A ngeles


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The best was Xbox on Will & Grace and Nissan and Motorola on The Sopranos. To hear TonySoprano say, "This is a Motorola, the best fucking phone there is," is the way people really talk about brands.

H AYE S ROTH vp-worldwide marketing and business development, Landor, N ew Y ork

The one that blew me away was A Series of Unfortunate Events and Aflac. It was certainly onmessage and also out of the box. You think of the duck and think what a tacky, borrowed-interestdevice, but they managed to have fun with it. Another one was The Apprentice, which is like onelong ad placement. It's real brand engagement.

A L RI E S chairman of Ries & Ries, A tlanta

I think one of the best is Coca-Cola and American Idol, mainly because of the gimmick they usewhich is the red room, which is consistent with the brand image. The worst is hard to saybecause I don't remember. The worst thing of all is to be ignored.

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How Much Is This Shot Worth