Is Product Placement The Next Blogging Frontier?
I was talking the other day with Chris Pearson about product placement. We spoke briefly about that being the next wave to hit blogs.
We already accept advertising. I do anyway, so if you’d like to advertise here, send me an email.
And unconsciously, we place products in our posts.
So if we’re going to do it, should we get compensated for it ?
I eat at Applebee’s a lot. If Applebee’s wants to compensate me for every mention of their name on this blog, within reason, is that so bad ?
I use Neutrogena shaving products. Would it hurt this blogs focus if they paid me for every time I mention them ?
I love my Dish Network satellite service. So how bad would it be to mention them every time I mention watching Monday Night Football or Survivor ?
Dockers are my favorite slacks. Yes, I’d take free slacks for mentioning them in a second.
Tommy Bahama silk shirts make me all wiggly. I’d love to get paid to have all my photos done with one of their shirts.
I play Ping I3 blade irons and have a Ping carry bag. Do you think I’d take some thank-you dollars for telling everybody about that on Travelling Golfer ? I sure would.
I drive a Toyota Camry made right here in Kentucky. I drive around 60,000 miles a year. What would it hurt for them to compensate me for every mention of that fact ?
I used a new search tool that I got today to search for info about product placement and I’ll let a little link leak tell the rest of the story.
Rexblog.com points out some product placement in the classroom - ” Yesterday, I had an experience that amused me as I imagined the meltdown it would have caused an anti-adveristing-in-the-classroom advocate. “
Over at Lymabean, Lindsey says - ” I don’t generally find time or the proclivity to turn on tv shows, but recently I have to say I have become hooked on Showtime’s Weeds. Besides enjoying the bright eyed, mellow character that Mary-Louise Parker plays, I am particularly interested in the amount of product placement on the show. “
At ITPro, they spoke about pointless product placement - ” Product placement can and does have its merits when companies are trying to subliminally persuade us to buy their wares. “
TV Squad blogs about product placement on 30 Rock - ” The Newark Star-Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall (actually his friend Phil Rosenthal) points out on his blog that last night’s pilot for 30 Rock had an interesting bit of product placement: “
Over at OnTheCommons.org, David Bollier says that product placement invasion is intensifying - ” … spending on product placement advertising is going to surge in 2006 by 25%. Global spending will go to $7.5 billion this year and to $14 billion by 2010. “
Cheryl Shuman says paid product placement outpaces traditional advertising - ” Product placement spending in TV, film and other media is expected to climb another 38.8% to $3.07 billion in 2006, driven by the continued shift toward a paid placement structure from a barter and added-value model. “
PVR Wire says that product placement is the answer to ad skipping PVR’s - ” Compared to the $50bn advertising industry, the $2bn spent on product placement is relatively small. But one of the ways that advertisers think they can get around the PVR ad-skipping problem is with product placement. “
Kick-Ass Poker talks about the world of poker and product placement joining forces - ” It was only a matter of time until the burgeoning poker world would see product placement as a means of attracting visibility… “
There’s enough fodder for us to chew on, now we have to decide if product placement is or will be invading the blogosphere.
Is it already here ? Do you get paid to mention a product on your blog ?
Will it hurt bloggers and blogging ? Has it already ?
Here’s my thought - No, it isn’t big as of now. Yes, it will be soon.
No, it won’t hurt bloggers or blogging. It’ll just make the most popular ( read as lots and lots of viewers ) blogs even more money.
Blogging’s just another form of visual media. Advertising has been and always will be a part of visual media.
You might as well get used to it and make the best of it.
Start now by tracking which products you often mention on your blog and find a way to convert that into dollars that can pay for bandwidth and/or hosting.
After that, do like I do, set up a revenue stream to pay for your monthly expenditures, smallest first and then next smallest and so on, until you have them all covered.
When you’ve covered all of your monthly expenditures, start saving for retirement and/or a lake house. Or a boat. Or new golf clubs. Or a BMW.
Somebody’s gonna take the money, it might as well be a blogger.
Your turn.
Is product placement good for blogging or the end of all that’s holy ?
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
We’ve had this for years. It’s called affiliate marketing.
Hey Brian - That’s kinda what I thought, but there seems to be alot of uproar about paid postings.
Isn’t this the same thing as pay-for-posts ?
Would you use a paid prop in one of your tutorial videos ?
Would you use a image/photo on a blog that includes a product that you were paid to place there ?
Nah, I only recommend things I actually use (like your examples above) and I only get paid if someone buys.
I’m ignoring the uproar. As you know, people who “sell” what they don’t truly believe in don’t usually succeed, and neither do the companies they pimp for.
Thanks Brian.
I suspect you’re not alone in ignoring the uproar.
And I’m sure you’re right about those that try to sell what they don’t believe in.
But I would accept paid placements on products that I use and believe in.
So if any of the company’s mentioned above need to reach me…
One thing I keep coming back to on these product placement and pay 2 post issues is intention. If the intention is to deceive or hawk a product just for a buck, as Brian said they usually don’t succeed. On the other hand, if you believe in a product, the fact that you are getting something in return really doesn’t lessen the value of the opinion you are offering – IMHO.
Being up front and honest about what you’re saying goes a long way in helping to determine that intention. Trying to shyster in the blogosphere seems like way too much work, with way too much to lose. Besides, there seems to be an awful lot of ways to earn an honest buck out there.
You are absolutely right about all of that, Tony.
There are more ethical ways to make money than there are unethical ways.
Being a shyster only pays in the short-term.
Being completely honest in your advertising is the way that the old masters showed us was best.
A friend of mine works in product placement. She gets stuff like watches into The Bourne Supremacy and James Bond. A character in a film wearing a watch a person may be curious about is one thing, that character espousing the virtues of the watch, apart from wearing it, turns the film into an ad.
How would you wear a watch in your blog and go about your business? Perhaps you could wear a watch in a photo of yourself, but if you start talking about it you are just speiling for the watch. Is that still a blog post or an advert?
If you see no diffeence, your blog would certainly suffer. And, who cares that you are wearing such a watch in your blog, unless you are George Clooney and this is his blog. In short, I think the term “product placement” is a misnomer when transferred from film to the written word. In a film a product-placed watch is just an expensive prop that accords with what that character may indeed wear. It is a natural inclusion.
In a blog, why the hell would I care what brand of shaving foam you use or what you spray your armpits with? Who are you for that to make a difference to me? How could you subtly influence me that it would be worthwhile placing a product here?
If a teenager sees Jason Bourne drop kick five policemen and then check the time they may think wow that’s a cool watch. Product placement in a blog turns a blog into an advertisment, but in a film it doesn’t. And if it does, it ruins the film, the person thinks that’s just product-placed, that overlong lingering look at that global brand. It’s hard to get right in a movie. In a blog, I suspect it is impossible to get right unless at the outset you decide not to run a blog but a viral marketing campaign. Which is not a blog, it is merely posing as a blog.
If you were paid to include products, it would affect what you wrote. If you were paid after the fact by the Santa Claus of marketing checking up on product mentions, it would be something special, and then it would affect what you wrote in the future.
And if you recommended something I was really interested in, not your shaving foam or under-arm deoderant, something like a certain software product, and then it emerged you only recommended it because someone paid you and it crashed my computer and generally sucked, well I would mistrust your blog and probably not read it again. How would you gain?
I just don’t see how it can work.
Well Joe, I got you to read my post and quote the products I was talking about, so i proved i could influence you and even get you to respond.
Maybe in Amsterdam the citizens aren’t prone to what we marketers know to be effective Joe, but I’m betting they are and you don’t know how to go about using it to your advantage.
Maybe if you’d linked to a blog where you disprove all of what I said it would be more effective than you ” saying ” that you wouldn’t be influenced by product placement.
Did you read the numbers Joe ?
Do you suppose those people have tested and tracked their expenditures ?
Maybe ?
Do they pay your friend to do her job ? If so, that’s a good indication of the effectiveness that they find.
Not counting the Netherlands Joe, or any other country besides America, there are 300 million potential readers out there. I ain’t gonna make ‘em all happy, so I don’t try.
But if I can prove that I can influence about 100,000 of them on a weekly basis, somebody will pay me to do so.
Everybody doesn’t listen to Larry King, including me, but the advertisers line up to give him their money, their clothes, their shoes, their watches, their glasses, etc.
Here’s the mistake you and millions of others make, Joe - You ain’t the customer. Never assume that they think like you do … test their actions and track the results and then adapt your campaign to take advantage of those results.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Amsterdam? Is that where my electronic footprint says I am today? I love the Internet, I can be everywhere. Europe is accurate.
You know what, I can’t get “Neutrogena” out of my head. I can see what’s going to happen already. I’m going to start looking at Neutrogena products. You’re right, it doesn’t matter that I don’t care, because my unconscious is a sucker.
Hi again Joe,
The Netherlands is where it’s from, exactly.
Amsterdam was a guess and it worked .. as usual, to get another response from you.
Curiosity, like the comment I made about your location, is another powerful device that marketers use.
The subconscious is a powerful place to place your products … whether we believe it or not, it works.
There are people being paid stooopid money to find out little things like this, so we can use it to sell things to you.
BTW - I’ve tried at least 20 shaving gels/creams and none work as well as Neutrogena’s products.
Have you searched eBay for a silk Tommy Bahama shirt yet ?
You will
I could work a deal with Neutrogena to link to a special landing page everytime I mention their product and have them pay me .10 per visitor and over a year it might make me a few hundred to a few thousand dollars and never once hurt you or the blogs voice.
Not a big deal, dollar wise, but enough to pay for my weekends at the lake.
If I do that with enough products, I cover all my expenses and live more comfortably without any extra effort or pain to my readers.
Imagine the possibilities to people like Seth Godin or Mark Cuban or some other uber-blogger with stooopid amounts of traffic.
Whattaya think about those possibilities Joe ?
Been to eBay yet ?
You’ll go soon …. you getting very anxious to buy a Tommy Bahama silk shirt ….. rush to their site Joe …. Go now … buy the shirt … then shave with Neutrogena shaving cream …. the go eat at the European version of Applebee’s … then on to buying the Camry …
Hello Mike,
I thought you deserved my URL. I have some product placement in it today.
On Amsterdam and The Netherlands, when you said that I think I thought “he thinks he’s clever enough to know where I am, but he’s wrong”, but I don’t deny it got my attention. I’m actually in London. You’ve good at what you do though, I can see that. You have turned me around on this issue, more quickly than I am used to being turned around.
Great sentence: “The subconscious is a powerful place to place your products.” Absolutely.
I came here today for the first time from Copyblogger. You’ve made a sale.
Tommy Bahama silk shirts. Hmmm. My first thought was “no way”. My second thought was: “Tommy Bahama’s silk shirts, hmmm.”
Don’t leave me alone too long in a room with this man when I have a full wallet, that’s all I can say…
That’s amazing Joe.
Beautiful look to your blog and now you’re a ‘placer’ !
Your placements didn’t hurt the blog, the readers or you in any way.
Now, if you had the traffic numbers to demand it, you could go up and down High Street and to Sainbury’s and work yourself a deal.
It’s not for everybody, but it’s another possibility for those looking to monetize their blog.
Thanks for going along with a good attitude about it all.
BTW - that Tommy Bahama silk shirt will be such a liberating purchase that the plump girl and all the others will marvel at the way you’ve changed to a more varied person.
Have you ever thought of going in a merchant and letting them guide you to the purchase ?
The next time one of them asks what type of pastry you want, say ” I’m not sure what I want today. What do you suggest ? ”
I’ve found they mostly suggest their favorites, which is one way to find out something about that person that they already know about you.
Be gentle with all these new found techniques, you might just become a marketer.
Cheers Mike, but who is to say I am not already a marketeer, a man of many names, shall we say, who has a laze-around blog in which to expunge his love of literature and publish his utterly non-commercial writings? And that, under a still other name, he is a print-media copywriter so high-powered that the chances are that even you, Mike, are already wearing something he wrote the ad for. Maybe I even wrote the ad for that perfume your wife likes Mike, the one that… well, y’know… gets you going.
Take a tip from me Mike: It’s easy to fit people into boxes at first glance, but sometimes you may fit a person into a box that that person has made for you to fit them into for their own reasons. There is no-one easier to work than the person who you let imagine they are working you. You know this, but you also forget it.
You could be right, Joe, you could be right.
Leave a Comment