Does product placement work? A look at branding Website Brandchannel.com’s choices of the top product-placement brands suggests no–and yes.
Brandchannel gave a lifetime achievement award for product placement to Apple. But while Apple computers have been featured in films as diverse as “Short Circuit,” “Men in Black,” “Dodgeball,” and “Seed of Chucky,” Brandchannel writer Abram Sauer points out that during the nearly 20 years that Apple has been costarring in films, its share of the global computer market has declined to less than 2%.
“In terms of product placement’s effectiveness,” Sauer writes, “this raises some huge questions, one of which seems to imply that, at best, the effectiveness of product placement is completely unpredictable or, at worst, product placement doesn’t really work at all.”
On the flip side, Brandchannel awarded “Sideways” for its role in boosting sales of pinot noir since its release. The main character of the film is a wine snob who praises pinot noir throughout the movie. In the U.S., according to Brandchannel, sales of pinot noir rose 22% from mid-December to mid-January. “With everyone lamenting the difficulties of measuring the ROI of product placement,” Sauer writes, “‘Sideways’ presents impossible-to-ignore numbers on the powers of persuasion.”
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