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Product placement history shows that it was a form of `barter system' (Newell et al., 2006) which is still true today as seen
from in-film placements which are a trade off between the creative and
financial considerations (Karrh et al., 2003).
Diverse definitions of product placements are available in the literature. One
common aspect of these definitions is that they
all use words like, `planned entries', `for considerations', `paid inclusions',
and `purposeful' (Balasubramanian, 1991; Gupta and Gould, 1997;
Karrh,1998; Russell and Belch, 2005; and Schneider and Cornwell, 2005). This clearly
indicates that these product/brand appearances are not accidental but are a result of
conscious decision on part of organizations.
Movies and television were the main medium used for placing brands as seen from the
scope of earlier definitions. Over time, the practice of placements spread to
non-traditional medium and a new definition with a broader scope was propounded
by Karrh (1998) by using the words, `mass media'.
Numerous advantages of product placement like an attentive
audience, social nature of viewing and lack of
clutter as compared to advertisements have contributed to the growth of
this communication tool (Dunnett and Hoek, 1996). Nielsen forecasted
that advertisement spending on product placement in games in the US which
was $75 mn in 2005 was likely to reach $1 bn by 2010 (Kiley, 2006). In recent
years product placements have assumed significant importance for companies as
a powerful independent communication tool (Hudson and Hudson, 2006). Also
past research has shown that even when consumers do not recollect seeing
the placement the product makes it into the consideration set affecting future
buying decisions (Shapiro et al., 1997). Though
fair amount of research is done in this area few researches have focused on the
managerial aspects which can be drawn from the
results. Some researches have examined the
existing literature and studied the practice of product placements and
proposed frameworks for future research (Karrh,
1998; and Balasubramanian et al., 2006).
This review paper, by examining the findings of the past researches on placements,
identifies factors which could influence the
placement related effect on audience across media
and its implications for decision making.
In order to classify the articles and determine trends in the literature, all
full text, peer reviewed research papers from academic journals available on
EBSCO database were analyzed. The papers were searched using
the key words like, `product placement', `brand
placement' and `in-game advertising' and `advergames'. A total
of 62 researches published between 1996 and July
2009 were retrieved and used for the study (Figure
1). Out of the total number of studies, 41 were found to be
discussing audience effect of placements. All the variables discussed in these studies
are used to derive the influencing factors. The positive and negative influence
of variables on audience effects was identified. Further, details like year
of publication, media and country which were the focus of study and
measures used were noted by noting simple frequency and percentages
were computed as the data was nominal in nature. |
