I Want My MTV Product Placements!
Mar 9, 2011 | ICED Blog No comments yetI Want My MTV Product Placements!
Once upon a time, music videos were commercials that sold songs…
Now, they are increasingly becoming the sales tool for expensive product placement opportunities. Last year, Lady Gaga called in a 9 minute commercial with her “Telephone” video that featured less than subtle close-ups for Virgin Mobile, Diet Coke, Miracle Whip and the dating site Plenty Of Fish, among others. And now for the new video for “Hold It Against Me”, Britney Spears scored $500,000 before the cameras even rolled thanks to brands looking to get Britney to hold their products against her (including Plenty of Fish again which is likely to show up in a lot more music promos thanks to a deal with Interscope Records).
How many products can you spot?
What is the right metric for measuring the success of a product placement? Is it just a matter of how many close-ups you get for your product, no matter how blatant? The bump in sales? Or does the real success come from finding the organic integration of your product into the storyline… and lifestyle of the star in the spotlight?
The answer probably lies somewhere in the perfect mixture of all these factors. Perhaps Katy Perry came up with the right solution when she weighed in on this topic on Twitter last week:
