Product Placement in Music Videos free essay sample

In today’s society, we are bombarded by advertisements everyday of our lives. On average, Americans are potentially exposed to about 600-625 commercial messages in a single day, according to the American Association of Advertising Agencies. These can be in any form, from television or radio commercials, to outdoor billboards, to even the clothes that we wear. Typically, when watching any kind of broadcast media program, we know when the commercial breaks are on and are aware that we are viewing an attempt at getting us to buy something or go somewhere. This, however, is not always the case when advertisers seek to get our attention. A large category for advertising is known as Product placement, where advertisers pay to have products featured during programming or in movies, in addition to the ad’s we see every day. Today, these methods have managed to cross into the Music Video platform, using artists to promote certain brands or companies inside their own promotional visuals. We will write a custom essay sample on Product Placement in Music Videos or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page When MTV first broadcast in 1981, they were known for music, not just music videos. The station was the new â€Å"it† venue for the latest on music and news and opened new artistic doors for a generation. The station even had a ban on blatant marketing plugs in music videos and would blur or edit it out of the video completely. Nowadays, not only is MTV now known for such television gems as â€Å"The Jersey Shore† and â€Å"The Real World†, they also don’t play many music videos. However, when they do, you realize the ban on products in music videos has been given some heavy leeway. You can’t watch many of the latest popular music videos without suddenly realizing that Kodak Cameras are the bee’s knees, or that you want to go out to the bar tonight to try some â€Å"Revolucion Tequila†. Marshall McLuhan said in his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, â€Å"Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, t stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. When all production and all consumption are brought into a pre-established harmony with all desire and all effort, then advertising will have liquidated itself by its own success†. I feel like product placement falls into what he was talking about and has become one of the more successful ways of advertising a product or service, sometimes even over traditional television spot advertising. In music videos, it’s something that people watch over and over again. It was reported that 57% of young adults in the UK watch music videos on YouTube. When people watch music videos on the internet, they tend to watch them again. Unlike with traditional advertising, product placement in music videos opens the door for the product to be seen repeatedly and in a closer time frame. Unlike advertisements on television that, now with the DVR age, can be fast forwarded and skipped entirely, the target is seeing the product while seeing the music video, which he or she is not so inclined to skip through. Marshall McLuhan’s theory that says â€Å"the medium is the message†, meaning people will get the message effectively or not based on what medium is used as a delivery system. This is where his theory of hot and cool media comes into effect. When delivering a subliminal message, which is what product placement does, you have to have a medium that involves higher sensory participation. For example if a song is playing on the radio, you cannot see that the singer is holding a bottle of Fiji Water. They would have to say during the commercial break that they are sponsored by Fiji. That is unless, of course, you’re like Pitbul and throw some Kodak references in your lyrics. To effectively infiltrate your product into your media, there have to be visuals, which is why product placement is effective. The consumer knows they’re being marketed to, but it still creates a level of intrigue between the consumer and the product. Product placement in music videos was boosted by The Kluger Agency, an Advertising Agency that boasts a non-traditional approach to advertising. Their focus is on strategic partnerships and product placement throughout the music industry. They represent both the artists and the products so that brands can work personally with the musicians, as well as a creative team to come up with the best possible solution for advertising campaigns. The Agency has named this approach â€Å"Brand dropping†, most times incorporating brands into the song lyrics as well as their accompanying videos. For example, in the music video for â€Å"The Time (Dirty Bit)† by The Black Eyed Peas, â€Å"brand dropping† fails when BEP member apl. e. ap raps the line â€Å"its gotta be the Apple, I’m the Mac daddy, y’all† while showing a Blackberry Tablet (a product that actually does not exist yet, although there were plans to release such a product). While not always effective, in an industry whose profits are being diminished by music pirating, these kinds of product placement solutions for artists create funds for album and music video production. In addition to large corporations integrating their products into music videos, the artists themselves often take time to push their own endeavors. Britney Spears often drops the name of her perfume â€Å"Radiance† in her music videos, specifically in the videos for â€Å"Hold It Against Me† and â€Å"Criminal†. Avril Lavigne is also seen running through the â€Å"Abbey Dawn† section of a clothing store and putting the clothes on, with Abbey Dawn incorporated into the clothing’s designs. Even Lady Gaga can be seen sporting her own designed pair of Heartbeats By Lady Gaga headphones, a project she embarked on in partnership with the Beats by Dre brand. In addition to putting products in the music videos themselves, advertisers take advantage of the medium used for broadcast. Forty-eight percent of American consumers, according to Nielsen, view online video and advertisers are ready to take advantage of that. With music videos receiving little to no airtime outside of the late night time slots, people have turned to the internet to view their favorite artist’s creations and it shows, with eight out of ten of the Top Viral Videos being music videos. Advertisements prevail on websites such as YouTube, where there is an ad before your video starts, a banner that is shown during the video, a smaller banner above the video, and, most times, links to other videos, which also contain more advertisements. The first video I watched was Lady Gaga’s music video for the song â€Å"Telephone† on YouTube. It started with an ad for Mary J. Blidge in American Express Presents: Unstaged, an online series made as part of a partnership with YouTube and Vevo. I noticed there was also a small banner ad to the right of the video above the four promoted Music Videos for the same series that was advertised before the video. The music video itself had tons of examples to pull from in regards to Product Placement. To begin with, the first product to make an appearance was Lady Gaga herself with her song â€Å"Paper Gangster† playing in the exercise yard. This was followed by a close up of an inmate wearing Lady Gaga Heartbeat’s headphones, playing another one of her songs â€Å"I Like It Rough†. From there it went on a tirade of scenes that seemed to be designed to promote ads, such as a close up of her stealing a Virgin Mobile telephone (shown in two separate scenes), wearing coke cans in her hair and coach sunglasses, browsing the dating site Plentyoffish. om on an HP Beats by Dre computer, eating a Honey Bun, using a Polaroid camera (also shown in two different scenes), Miracle Whip (again, 2 different scenes! ), and Wonder Bread. The only two products that did not have any financial contribution were Coke and Wonder Bread, both being additions made by Gaga. Purposely, there was a tie-in between Lady Gaga and all the products that were paid to be put into her video. The laptop used in the video, the HP Envy 15 Beats Edition, comes with headphones and software by rapper Dr. Dre.Monster, the company that makes Dr. Dre’s Beats headphones, makes Lady Gaga’s Heartbeats headphones as well. Also, soon before the release of the video, Lady Gaga was named the Creative Director for a specialty line of Polaroid products. Even the dating website shown in her video had done a promotional contest to win a date with Lady Gaga and tickets to her concert, not to mention Plenty Of Fishs partnership with Interscope Records, Lady Gaga’s record label. Lastly, Gaga’s worldwide Monster Ball Tour was sponsored by Virgin Mobile. This video was an excellent example of â€Å"Brand Dropping†, due to all the products featured in her video were directly related to her and a product that she was trying to sell, alongside the hosting companies. That is to say, except for Miracle Whip, which has no ties to Lady Gaga, and, in my opinion, opted to be in Gaga’s video to support the new edgier Branding strategy they’ve been putting out lately with their commercials. The second video I watched was Britney Spears’ â€Å"Hold It Against Me† video. Again, before the video started, I was shown an advertisement for the Xbox Kinect Game â€Å"Dance Central 2†. Just as with the previous video, there was a banner ad on the right of the video for the same game. In the video, Spears rather shamelessly and spokes womanly, holds up a bottle of her own â€Å"Radiance† Perfume, applies eye shadow from Makeup Forever, and rises mystically surrounded by 360 degrees of Sony television screens playing her music video repertoire. She also, seemingly out of place with the rest of the video, is seen surfing the website Plentyoffish. com (yes, Britney Spears is also an Interscope artist) on a touch screen Sony Computer. I actually could not count the amount of times the word Sony showed up in the four and a half minute video, between actual use and just flashes of the word Sony, which I thought was unusual seeing as Sony’s Record company is the second largest of the â€Å"Big Four† record companies, behind Universal Music Group, which owns Interscope Records. It has been noted that Spears earned Five hundred thousand dollars in revenue from the Product placement in the video, two hundred thousand coming from Plenty Of Fish alone. For my third and final example, I chose to use an artist that doesn’t have the same level of video views as the big LG and Britney. While Telephone and Hold It Against Me boast 128,498,663 and 70,284,020 views, respectively, Minogue’s â€Å"All The Lovers† only claims 11,635,129 views and has been available for the same amount of time as Telephone, and came out months before Hold It Against Me. The difference in advertising was evident right away. Unlike the previous two videos, â€Å"All The Lovers† was not preceded by a commercial. Instead, at the 10 second mark in the video, a banner came up from the bottom of the video promoting a singer named Kari Jobe and her new single â€Å"We Are†. I did not know who Kari Jobe was before seeing it and out of curiosity, stopped to find out about her. As it turned out, she is a Christian Singer signed to EMI Music, the parent label of Parlophone, which Kylie Minogue is signed to. As far as product placement in the video, there is only one product featured and it is not heavily used in the â€Å"story† of the video, and that is BMW. Used more in a visual aesthetic kind of way, the car is only seen releasing white balloons and is parked all along the sides of the road seen in the video. While not the perfect camouflage, the product is incorporated well into the video and blends well with the visual theme of the video. While no one denies Minogue’s success as an artist, she has always been one of moderate success in the United States, and therefore isn’t used the same way as â€Å"Mega Stars† like Lady Gaga and Beyonce, where their star power gives them the leeway to do the things they do as far as advertising. In conclusion, as we look back on the last decade, Product placement in music videos has definitely come a long way, to being prevalent in many of the videos we see. McLuhan had relevant theories in regard to advertising, even back in a time where we did not have the same technology that we have now that revolutionized how we distribute information and reach mass peoples. Those theories have proven well, even in the category of product placement. Thanks to McLuhan, we can analyze every aspect of a media delivery system and find the best and most efficient way to utilize its strengths and make people aware of products and services in a more streamlined and efficient way. While the thought of being solicited while watching artists we enjoy for their music or showmanship feels like it should be unsettling, the business is growing bigger than ever with brands shelling out 6 figures for about 10 seconds of actual screen time, and the videos are doing better than ever.