How Much Is Product Placement Worth?

摘要

In late October, Peter Gardiner, the media chief of Madison Avenue's Deutsch agency, found himself gambling millions of a Bank America ad budget on an unusual TV deal. The proj-ect—a 17-day-long product-placement and ad package involving four TV networks—NBC, Telemundo, MSNBC and CNBC—and NBC's affiliated stations. Because the stakes were so high, without any explicit guarantee of how many times the bank would be plugged, Gardiner ordered a special study that analyzed every hundredth of a second of coverage. It included every detail of how, when and in what context Bank of America was mentioned or shown by the TV outlets. Ultimately, Bank of America made a killing, netting millions in traditional ad value. But the white-knuckle experience left Gardiner wondering if there wasn't a better way to craft such deals.