Product Placement: Lady Gaga’s Music Video
The Situation
Call it what you will: embedded branding or branded entertainment – the marketing tactic of placing branded products inside emotionally engaging and relevant programming isn’t exactly a new concept. But, when it comes to product placement, how do you measure exposure? Can you measure brand and ad recall? Can you get a feeling for overall impact? How can you create standards for matching a product with the most effective context? Are there reliable metrics to help with pricing more competitive product placements over others?
There are a number of installed methodologies that marketers can use to answer these questions. Traditional testing methodologies such as observation, self-reporting, questioning methods and case studies to test product recall have all been employed to achieve that perfect balance of having limited-but-enough exposure to promote recall and elicit an emotional response that could impact purchasing decisions without interfering with the overall consumer experience. But we wanted to use eye tracking to take this one step further. We wanted to determine if there are significant trends in size of branded products or length of exposure that reliably result in product recall; and use preliminary data to design a study that could attempt to determine ideal parameters for embedding products without disturbing the viewer’s experience.
The Solution
Lady Gaga’s music video Bad Romance was a natural place to begin. Over the span of its five-minute running time, the video includes a host of branded items including shots of an HP Envy laptop, Nemiroff Lex Vodka, Carrera sunglasses, an iPod classic, a Wii controller and Dr. Dre headphones and ear buds. Peppered with brand placement there was enough diversity in size, duration of exposure and branding to draw some preliminary conclusions about the parameters that lead to recall.
We measured attention data over Bad Romance using eye tracking to determine which were the important predictors of product recall.
The Outcome
We discovered:
- The factors that resulted in maximus visual attention are frequency of product appearance but not display size.
- The relationship between the amount of time participants dwelled on a product and the number of appearances that product made explains nearly 92% of cued recalls.
- Some products had parallel brands competing with their exposure or other semantic attractors that likely disrupted their call for attention.
In the end, the case study indicated parameters that enhance the return on investment for embedding products.