Buyology - Martin Lindstrom [21]
These days, we’re yanked, tugged, pelted, pushed, prodded, reminded, cajoled, whispered at, overloaded, and overwhelmed by a constant stream of in-your-face product placement. The result? Snow-blindness. Or close to it. By any chance, did you happen to see Casino Royale, the latest James Bond movie starring Daniel Craig? Do you remember any products that were featured in the film? FedEx? Bond’s Omega Watch? Sony’s Vaio computer? Louis Vuitton? Ford? Believe it or not, they all made uncredited walk-ons. Ford, in fact, manufactures every single car in Casino Royale, including a Land Rover, a Jaguar, a Lincoln, and Bond’s signature Aston Martin. And Sony showcased not just its Vaio computer but its Ericsson phones, Blu-ray players and LCD televisions.9 But if you’re like me, the only product you remember from Casino Royale is the Aston Martin, and that’s probably due more to a well-known association with James Bond cemented over the years than an actual memory from the movie (and with the cheapest Aston Martin selling for around $120,000, I doubt there were all that many takers).
When it comes to product placement, television is hardly left behind. Leslie Moonves, chairman of the CBS Corporation, predicts that soon up to 75 percent of all scripted prime-time network shows will feature products and plotlines that advertisers have paid for.10 It’s a staggeringly high figure that, if he’s right, would further muddy the already-fragile lines between advertising and creative content so profoundly as to alter the very meaning of entertainment. Rance Crain, the editor-in-chief of Advertising Age, once put it succinctly: “Advertisers will not be satisfied until they put their mark on every blade of grass.”11
WE’D PRESENTED OUR brain-scan subjects with a sequence of twenty product logos, each one appearing for a single second. Some were logos for various companies that aired thirty-second commercials during American Idol, including Coke, Ford, and Cingular. We called these product placements branded logos. We also showed our volunteers logos from companies that had no products placed within the show—everything from Fanta to Verizon to Target to eBay. We referred to these as unbranded logos, meaning they had no connection or sponsorship affiliation with the show. Then we showed our viewers a twenty-minute-long special edition of American Idol, as well as an episode of a different show that would serve as a benchmark to statistically validate our final results. When our viewers had finished watching the two shows, we rescreened the precise same sequence of logos three times in a row.
Our goal was to find out whether viewers would remember which logos they had seen during the show and which ones they hadn’t. Over the years, neuromarketing research has found that consumers’ memory of a product, whether it’s deodorant, perfume, or a brand of tequila, is the most relevant, reliable measure of an ad’s effectiveness. It’s also linked with subjects’ future buying behavior. In other words, if we remember Mitchum Roll-On, Calvin Klein’s Euphoria, and Don Julio Anejo tequila, we’ll be far more likely to reach for them the next time we’re in a store or add them to our cart the next time we’re shopping online. So it made sense to compare the strength of subjects’ memories for the logos—both Branded and Unbranded—that they’d seen both before and after watching American Idol.
A week later, Professor Silberstein and I met up to discuss the results.
First, in the before-the-program testing, Professor Silberstein had found that despite how frequently the products from the three major sponsors—Ford, Cingular Wireless, and Coca-Cola—appeared in American Idol, the subjects showed no more memory for these products than for any of the other randomly chosen products they viewed before the study began. Meaning, our branded logos and our unbranded logos began the race on even ground.
It wouldn’t stay that way for long. After viewing