One Click Product Placement

When I first read this I was confused.  What does this mean?  We had studied product placement approaches since Soap Boxes in the silent era. And the general idea has existed for a long time.  But now take it further and make it adaptive by product segment too.  Good discussion at the link ..

Amazon tests one-click product placement

While offering original movies and TV shows has long been touted as a perk to boost Prime membership, Amazon is rolling out another way to capitalize on its content: product placement.

In Japan, Amazon has teamed up with entertainment company Yoshimoto Kogyo to insert product placements into an Amazon Prime Video TV show exploring Japanese cuisine.

“The first shows will exhibit dishes from the northern island of Hokkaido and feature local comedy duo Taka and Toshi, who found nationwide fame with Yoshimoto,” according to Nikkei.

Viewers will be able to tap Amazon’s “1-Click” icon to order certain products featured in the program.

The initially planned four episodes will run around 40 minutes each. Future videos will feature other places in Japan, as well as “some locations overseas,” Nikkei says.

“The idea that you could have whatever you want by just clicking a button is certainly enticing, but having the ability to constantly consume is a weird future, to the say the least,” wrote Leslie Horn on Vocativ, a news site focused on media and technology. “Although, I’m sure most people have had the experience of watching, say, an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s ‘No Reservations,’ and wondered what the culinary oddity he’s sampling tasted like. With Amazon’s new strategy, one wouldn’t have to wonder.”

The one-click proposal expands on the Dash Button, Amazon’s one-click replenishment system launched in 2015; the one-click “Buy it Now” button on its website, as well as the one-command ordering through the Echo voice-enabled assistant.  .... " 

Proximus Retail Analysis

Brought to my attention:  Proximus.

Acquire. Analyse. Improve.

Real-time insights
Our unique technology tracks every single customer in-store to an accuracy of 1.5m every second without cameras nor smartphones. 

Optimal product placement
Directly measure the impact of any campaign in your store: number of views and time customers spend in front of each product. 

Efficient staff management
Let us suggest strategic changes in your store: our BigData technology analyses the results in nearby stores to optimize yours. .... " 

3M Visual Attention Service Update

We examined the 3M VAS Attention Service scanning tool several times,  some new developments.  Press release. An Explanatory video.  Worth looking at  closely, free trial available.

" ...3M launches the fourth generation of its Visual Attention Service (VAS) scanning tool, with new video capabilities and sequencing features. VAS - viewed by marketers as a more convenient and affordable alternative to eye tracking – enhances the visual impact of professional design across advertising, marketing, and all forms of digital and print media, increasing the probability that the most desired elements will get noticed.

VAS analyzes video to illustrate how people are most likely to interact with any scene and identify where the average human eye will focus at any given moment – a capability invaluable to those looking to predict consumers’ visual journey in retail environments, and how that journey plays into the path to purchase. New sequencing capabilities demonstrate the sequence of fixation points where the human eye is most likely to pay attention in the first few seconds of viewing an image. Customized setting options for direct mail/email and in-store contexts automatically take into account how human vision interacts with different viewing circumstances.

Additional applications include:
Product placement
Packaging design
Point-of-sale displays and signage
Television and infomercials
Film trailers
Rich media advertising and other online video
Direct marketing   .... "

P&G Shaping the Store with Virtual Reality

In CGT, an excellent and fairly detailed article on Procter & Gamble's development of the virtual store concept within it's  innovation centers.   The first time I have seen this detailed publicly, including a picture of a life-size virtual store display.  This was previously mentioned in less detail in A.G. Lafley's book:  The Game Changer of a few years ago.

The development and use of virtual reality capabilities started in 1997 and have dealt with the construction of trials to improve the understanding of how shoppers shop.  Virtual reality allows shelves to be arranged and placed quickly in preparation for experiments to understand the nature and details of shopper shelf interaction with aisle, shelf and package in a retail context.  Real people or simulation models can be used to load the interaction for tests.


' .... “Together, we delivered a set of virtual solutions tools that better deliver on the needs of our businesses, customers and consumers,” says Bernard Eloy, associate director, Virtual and Modeling Simulations Services for GBS. “This enables P&G to go to market smarter, faster and more efficiently, and empowers internal collaboration and external connections to consumers and customers.”

Over the years, 19 more virtual solutions centers have popped up in P&G facilities around the world. These centers have life-sized screens backed by computer modeling, simulation and 3D technologies that present new P&G products as they might appear on store shelves. Consumers are then invited to view and assess these virtual product representations, which helps P&G to better understand their wants and needs. Meanwhile, sophisticated software helps P&G record consumer reactions to product placement, shapes, colors and designs.

According to Eloy, virtual solutions tools are now used in almost 80 percent of all P&G initiatives and have yielded critical capabilities in three key areas ..... '

Viewing Product Placement

The Times of London looks at Martin Lindstrom's view of how to do product placement right. American Idol experience used as an example for the application of neuroscience principles. Subscribe to his newsletter.

UK Lifts Product Placement Ban

Apparently in the UK placed products in imported shows are often blurred. Inside the UK product placements are banned. The BBC reports that this placement ban is to be lifted, a least for foreign shows. The way I read the article the ban is in place because the method is seen as dishonest. It is suggested that if it is done for UK produced programming there will be clear disclaimers to indicate that any placement is done for pay. At what point does the knowledge of the public that these are placements make this redundant? Does this becomes similar to marking situation comedy as 'fiction'?

Link provided by Richard James.

Product Placement and Memory

Can a product placement delete your product from a consumer's memory? Martin Lindstrom video.

Branding Only Works on Cattle

Have now read Jonathan Salem Baskin's book: Branding Only Works on Cattle: The New Way to Get Known (and drive your competitors crazy). He also has  a supporting blog.

First of all, although I have existed in the midst of the profession for some time, I am not a marketer. I was taught that brand and its equity were the things that advertising spending was always trying to establish and then re-inforce. It was positioned as establishing attention and then maintaining it. Then this would naturally lead to changes in behavior, most especially the buying of your product. Baskin says that the last transition is a big assumption.

Baskin's book is deliciously iconoclastic. He starts by pointing out that little advertisement really works as expected at all ... ad repetition can even decrease the likelihood of the buying behavior we desire. The vaunted 'brand equity', may not be as clear a useful measure as we thought.

I recall many a time in front of the TV, seeing endless repetitions of an ad, or the often bizarre and absurd nature of Superbowl ads and thinking 'Will this cause me to buy this product?'. I found myself saying no. I even started thinking negatively of the brands behind the ads. If I could figure out what they were selling at all. Of course the traditional belief is that ads establish and maintain brand equity, and very well known brands have benefited from this process.

He even briefly covers techniques like brain scanning, where he points out that determining how a brain lights up when exposed to a brand may be about awareness, but this does not mean it is about purchase behavior. Context also matters.

Baskin says he is about fundamentally changing the philosophy of marketing. He is also skeptical about most of what is being done with Web 2.0, since he says it does not contribute to behavior. While conversations with your brand are what are supposed to be happening online, few conversations actually happen. The only extended conversations are arguments. Video mashups are seen by many, but do they drive useful behavior beyond entertainment?

Given how much whole industries are built up to to support the current brand philosophy, and the philosophy behind brand conversations, this will be hard to sell.

Search has become very important, as he says ' ... Loyalty is not only as fleeting as 'what have you done for me lately would suggest, but it is even more tenuously dependent on what my community thinks about it or what it says about what you did for the next customer ... '. He also suggests that " ... the content consumers experience doesn't build brand equity but rather spends it ... '.

He suggests that user generated content is the 'wrong answer to the right question' , and that it leads to wasting the consumers time, rather than engaging them. In another quote " entertaining consumers is just a distraction ...".

Baskin thinks that most game-associated marketing, such as product placement of brands in a game, is wasted. He does praise Alternate Reality Games (ARG) which try to layer multiple kinds of experience and interact directly with the customer. He gives some good examples that are worth reading, pointing to Dave Szulborski's book: "This is not a Game: ..." for background. On my list.

Late in the book in a section he calls 'A Modest Proposal' where he suggests management principles that include methods that use biological and complexity models. Good thought, but the book was unclear about exactly how these simulation-based based methods would be implemented, especially in current marketing cultures. So the proposal is more than modest. He points to Deming's quality work as another possible approach for improving marketing.

Overall I really liked this book. He echoes some suspicions I have had about marketing rigor. It will make me think differently about branding from now on. I think he is right when he says it is all about consumer behavior, not just impressing them with out cleverness. They may play, even engage, but will they buy? It is all about real consumer behavior in the right context.

Jonah Bloom in AdAge says it succinctly:

" A book that not only raises serious questions about many of the methods used by today's marketers, but actually argues that branding as most people think of it is bullshit and that its proponents couldn't get us to tie our shoelaces, much less reprogram our subconscious to buy their stuff. The central argument here is that for all marketers' talk, man-hours and budgets, they waste a lot of time on things that don't change consumer behavior.... "

Irrational Product Placement

I am a late student to product placement. Around since 1896 when Sunlight Soap was featured in a number of Lumiere silent movies. A frame at the right. Here is one blatant example. More on YouTube. I had always thought that these were subtle, creating only a natural placement of a product where it would be anyway. Better than say, have a generic product label. I was wrong, a car blogger points out some very unnatural automobile placements in older and even movies still showing today. Revealing.

Update: Richard James points me to excellent WP piece on early product placement ... and of course Soap Operas, created by my former employer. They even attempted early online serials, which were not generally successful.

Unilever Axe Web Campaign

From Brandweek via GMA Smartbrief:

Unilever launches Web campaign for Axe product
Unilever is teaming up with Wired Digital to promote its Axe Detailer Shower Tool through a targeted ad campaign operated by SnapAds. The push is part of a larger campaign to promote the Axe brand to men through online and print media ... "

SnapAds is interesting because it seeks to optimize online ad placement, including the use of genetic algorithm methods. This makes sense since online presence gives enough data for testing and then evolving better solutions.