Amazon and NBCUniversal are looking to take a new approach to product placement in an innovative way, by making it potentially dynamic. New technological advancements, leveraging AI, look to recognise spaces like billboards in video content and allow advertisers to superimpose new messaging onto these placements anytime.
We have seen this technology develop over the years within live sport, where brands and products have been superimposed over playing surfaces. Now it appears that this could be coming to TV shows and movies on Amazon Prime Video and Peacock.
Product placement often receives criticism by consumers for placing ads into environments where they are not expected. Consumers are attuned to commercial breaks when watching TV, so there is often an expected trade off when watching certain mediums. But with the increased proliferation of streaming services, these ‘breaks’ are becoming less common. As a result, streaming services have begun looking for new revenue opportunities to capture ad revenue.
Challenges with product placement
Product placement has always been a pretty contentious topic with consumers. When done right it can have a huge impact on brand recognition and consideration. When done poorly it can be confronting, taking people out of the immersion of what they are watching, and invariably creating a negative experience towards the movie or TV show, and importantly the brand itself. Just look at any Michael Bay film for an example of ways product placement has been used to put the product in as prominent of a position as the content within the scene.
In addition to this, product placement can be a difficult proposition for businesses to buy into. Due to the longevity of content, especially with the rise of streaming services, businesses need to be able to show products that are likely to be available for a long time to avoid potential supply chain shortages, and from disappointing consumers if they are persuaded to consider buying.
Also, the cost of putting these products into a scene in a movie can be astronomical. Take, for example, Heineken’s appearance in the 2012 James Bond film, Skyfall. It is rumoured that Heiniken paid $45m USD for a solemn looking Bond to lie in bed and sip a Heiniken in one scene. While that may sound like a lot, consider that Skyfall made $1.109b USD at the box office, and the cost for that kind of exposure suddenly becomes a bit more tolerable from a brand perspective.
Why could this be important?
Amazon’s Prime Video, and NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming services are some of the most popular services, based on subscriber numbers, in the US. The audience scale available from these two companies means that this could be a successful proposition for companies to explore, and can be scaled up globally. Amazon and NBCUniveral can continually monitise the product placement throughout the lifecycle of the content on their streaming services, and provide new ad formats into an environment that features no, or limited traditional ad formats, such as ads served during ‘ad breaks’.
From a brand perspective, this introduces the possibility of creating one-to-one messaging, which can be adjusted constantly, allowing for more dynamic messaging, with less fear of shifts in product supply, product rebranding, and also allowing brands to be more reactive to the market. Considering that Amazon sits on a huge amount of buyer behaviour data in the US, this could then be used to show more relevant products based on purchase history and intent from Amazon.
The biggest question mark around this is how both companies will approach evaluating and classifying the content to ensure that product placement makes sense within the context of the show. For example, it would not make sense to see an ad for a new Aston Martin in a classic Sean Connery James Bond film. Or an English billboard appearing in a foreign language show. It is crucial that these ad formats are made to align with the right content.