The professionals of Comp Edge Media are often asked .... What is Product Placement and how does that work?

The intent of this page is to help people from all walks of life, understand the meaning of Product Placement & Brand Licensing.

Introduction to How Product Placement Works

The latest trend in advertising is to make it, well, less advertorial. The tendency is to move away from in-your-face ads, where the product is the star, to mini-movies­ or quasi-documentary vignettes that feature "real-life scenarios" with the product(s) hovering in the background. Some would argue it's a sort of "art imitating art imitating life" scenario -- where ads are imitating the practice of product placement.

Photo courtesy Amazon.com
The DeLorean played a prominent role
in the "Back to the Future" movies. See more movie making pictures.

This may seem a bit confusing, but really, it's quite simple. The majority of us are getting tired of ads. Today's consumer is inundated with advertising everywhere: television, radio, billboards, magazines, buses, newspapers, the Internet... And these are just the usual suspects. More and more ad-space is popping up every day. From people walking down the street wearing signs, to flyers on our cars and in our mailboxes, to ads on the ATM screen as we wait for it to dispense our cash -- we see ads all day, every day.

Even television networks that depend on advertising dollars to stay in business know that it can be useful to ditch the interruptions and present a show without ads from time to time. The ABC network did it for "Gideon's Crossing" in 2000 and for "Alias" in 2001. FOX did it for its hit series "24" in 2002.