For those in the marketing industry, product placement is nothing new. Iconic brands paying money to be showcased in high profile media is the name of the game. With the advent of social media, these product placements have gotten bigger, crazier and more expensive.
I believe the most successful product placement ever occurred at this year’s #Oscars event. The funny thing is, not many industry outsiders even noticed. So which company placed the product? Samsung. And which social media outlet was associated with it? Twitter.
Comedian and host Ellen DeGeneres showed the world how dynamic our digital society has become when she systematically crashed Twitter, boosted sales for Samsung, and made the President look like an amateur. (Ellen’s tweet garnered over 8 times the amount of retweets as the President’s tweet when he won the re-election).
In an age of real-time news and popular media, it took almost five days for the public to even recognize that it was, in fact, product placement. Most people thought it was an off-the-cuff gimmick that Ellen orchestrated. In reality, it was just a creative ploy to grab the mindshare of millions in one small click. The Wall Street Journal reported, “While the stunt felt spontaneous, it wasn’t entirely unplanned. As part of its sponsorship and ad pact for the Oscars with ABC, the TV network airing the show, Samsung and its media buying firm Starcom Media Vest negotiated to have its Galaxy smartphone integrated into the show, according to two people familiar with the matter.”
So 3.2 million retweets: Was it completely unexpected…or was it?
I’d argue that there were careful analytics done with the celebrities involved and they had a very good idea of the potential success that this tweet could have. Everything in the creative world comes down to numbers and analytics. More and more often in 2014 are we seeing companies of all sizes, not just behemoths like Samsung, utilizing creative strategies alongside complex analytics to engage a fan base and grow brand awareness.
It comes down to taking advantage of social networks, like Ellen did perfectly at the Oscars. She took an everyday occurrence, like taking a selfie with a melting pot of celebrities and tweeted it on the popular social platform. It wasn’t even about the product, but the selfie wouldn’t have come into fruition without the mobile device. I call this move sheer brilliance.
Ellen and her Oscar selfie is one example of product placement, but it’s an even better example of how social media has been such a game changer.
Social platforms have changed the way product placement works how much they’ve changed the potential magnitude of an ad campaign’s success.
So, what’s the important takeaway from all of this? The value of product placement in marketing and branding is much higher when the focus is on the experience provided by the product, not the product itself. In this campaign, Samsung focused on the experience that the phone was able to create (getting all those A-Listers together for the ultimate selfie). Let this be a lesson to business owners of all sizes: Whenever you try to leverage product placement on any scale – it’s all about highlighting the experience.