Jun 19 Press Release

Product Placement – the next steps

13 June, 2013 | By Anne-Marie Corvin www.broadcastnow.co.uk

Product placement was talked up as a multimillion-pound industry when it became legal in the UK two years ago. Has it lived up to expectations? Ann-Marie Corvin reports

When Ofcom relaxed the rules on product placement (PP) in February 2011, the industry welcomed the news with gusto – which, appropriately, was the name of the first product to receive paid-for airtime on a UK TV show.

ITV’s reported £100,000 deal with Nestlé, which placed its Dolce Gusto coffee machine on This Morning for three months, hailed the dawn of a new era.

Pact predicted that paid-for PP opportunities in TV shows would inject more than £72m into the UK television market “in the short term”, while Barclays Corporate forecast it would be worth £150m a year by 2016.

More recent evaluation by market research company WARC, however, suggests far more modest sums: PP deals in UK television were thought to be worth £2m in 2011 and £5m in 2012.

Most of these deals have focused on established behemoths such as Coronation Street, This Morning, The X Factor, Big Brother and Hollyoaks – shows on which broadcasters can test new business models as they have already proven to be commercially lucrative.

According to Laurence Jones, director of Endemol-owned Initial, the company has more than doubled its PP deals this year, which has brought in “over six figures”. He attributes this to the work it has been doing with C5 on Big Brother: tie-ins with the likes of Morrisons, Schwarzkopf and Touchstone Pictures.

“Big Brother has been the main driver for us,” he says. “One or two shots of a product on that daily show has enabled us to show brands what PP can do for them.”

For lower-profile productions, however, or new series, some argue that PP is not yet worth the effort. “We haven’t done one deal,” says John Nolan, head of commercial programming and digital content at North One.

Nolan believes PP deals are less common among smaller companies because it’s easier for producers to use the established prop-placement model, in which brands (usually via prop-placement agencies) supply TV shows with their products for no profit.

He says: “It’s almost impossible to move to a monetised system when a non-monetised system still works. Producers are suckers for free stuff, and with paid-for, it’s currently just too much hard work to make it work.”

One of the big challenges for those involved in PP is to ensure there is joined-up thinking between the media agency, the broadcaster’s creative, commercial and marketing teams, and the production company.

While Initial does have one new series that has attracted PP (ITV’s forthcoming tropical quiz show Prize Island), Jones acknowledges that it remains a challenge. “It’s complicated,” he says. “It’s about forming creative partnerships with the commercial world and getting them to understand what we’re trying to do.”

For a handful of bigger deals, it may be worth the sweat, but Nolan argues that it is too much effort for the sake of a few grand. “I don’t spend much of my working day shoring up budgets with PP. No one is writing big cheques at the moment, so why bother?”

The whole package

Darryl Collis, director of product placement agency See Saw (which undertakes both paid-for and prop placement deals for brands), says that typically, brands wanting paid-for placements would be advised to commit around £100,000 for guaranteed exposure on a main terrestrial channel.

“For anything less, it’s not worth the effort for all those involved,” he says. However, Jones points out that prop-placement is ad hoc – there’s no guarantee the product will be featured – and, unlike paid-for PP, it’s not an ad platform that can trigger an integrated marketing campaign.

For Lime, producer of Hollyoaks and TOWIE (both of which have attracted substantial PP deals), this type of integration is key. PP usually forms part of a bigger package around sponsorship or ad-funded programming (AFP).

Lime joint managing director Kate Little says: “While they do exist, it is incredibly rare to come across a pure product placement deal. Typically, it may be entered into as part of a sponsorship arrangement.”

However, none of Lime’s deals would have been possible had Ofcom not relaxed its guidelines on PP. An AFP sponsor can now, for the first time, feature its product in the show it wants to fund, a move Nolan welcomes.

“We’ve secured around 100 AFP deals and PP regulations have helped provide a contractual framework for everyone. It’s definitely given us some structure from a compliance point of view.”

Little adds that overall, PP deals tend to be much lower value than AFP. “As a producer, AFP represents a reasonably significant programme funding opportunity, whereas PP revenue is more likely to bridge a more modest gap in an overall programme business plan, or to represent an ancillary or secondary revenue opportunity for the producer/broadcaster.”

C4 partnership leader Rob Ramsey agrees that PP is “central” to the broadcaster’s AFP work. In 2011, New Look and BlackBerry became two of the first brands to take advantage of a PP opportunity on C4 with the ad-funded New Look Style Nation and Live And Lost With BlackBerry.

Ramsay estimates there have been around 50 PP deals since the rules were relaxed; C4 has been responsible for “approximately half of them”.

As a publisher-broadcaster with little in the way of programme IP, it’s not surprising that C4 is keen to own a stake in PP deals. To this end, the broadcaster has invested in research and staff to make sure that PP happens.

Six months ago, C4 interactive sponsorship manager Laura Cottrell became acting partnership business manager for AFP/PP, and the broadcaster is currently seeking a controller to focus solely on AFP and PP deals.

“We think this market will grow and we are investing real resources,” says Ramsey, who likens PP to the early days of sponsorship at C4 “but growing at a faster rate”.

Changing brand perception

The broadcaster conducted research to calculate the exact value of PP following its first slew of deals, and identified brand perception as its biggest impact.

Following Nokia Lumia’s appearance in Hollyoaks over a three-month period, for instance, viewers were more likely to see the smartphone as the best for their social networks; the easiest for one click-pictures and shoot-share; and to have the best range of apps.

The research, which polled around 200 viewers, found PP was welcomed “because it enhanced content credibility by making it more realistic and reflective of everyday life”. “PP produces a halo effect with brand positivity caused by its association with this new ad format,” Ramsey concludes.

When it comes to deals with indies, the split is done on “a fairly substantial basis”, he adds. Trying to ascertain what PP is worth to a brand, and how to measure it, is something with which broadcasters and brands are still experimenting.

ITV is using agency Repucom to monitor and evaluate product placement in its programmes. Metrics include the size of the product, where in the shot it appears, its duration on screen and the number of exposures, the degree of character interaction and whether the brand name is visible.

Repucom has joined forces with digital PP company MirriAd, which places products and signage into TV shows after they have been made.

According to MirriAd chief executive Mark Popkiewicz – a former BBC Ventures director – the service aims to automate the PP process as much as possible, linking finished programmes to brand opportunities. This is then linked to media rates, and finally, a value is attributed to this once the campaign has run its course.

Last year, this technology was used by C4 and Endemol on Deal Or No Deal, which inserted the PG Tips logo onto a mug of tea. The system is also being embraced by broadcasters in the US, Brazil and Italy.

The UK market, Popkiewicz observes, is more conservative. “Most broadcasters in the UK consider PP a dark art where one negotiates a single placement in a single series for nondescript money for unknown frequencies with multiple stakeholders. That’s a lot of work. Broadcasters need to get digital in their thinking so they can create sizeable opportunities,” he says.

Popkiewicz argues that it will be a long time before PP becomes a serious part of a brand’s media plan. Conversely, James Morris, head of MediaCom’s Beyond Advertising division, which looks at content opportunities for brands, argues for a more strategic, less automated approach.

“In terms of the planning process, PP is definitely considered in the mix of a brand’s media plan, but it requires media agencies to be creative on their own to come up with those ideas. Increasingly, we will work more proactively with broadcasters to do this.”

Morris says the most common PP model is for broadcasters’ commercial houses to approach agencies with a package of commercial value to put the product in their show. “It is generally focused around the big entertainment formats, and they tend to come without the programme commissioners or production companies involved. It’s more of a sales-labelling exercise.”

Morris would like to see a more editorial- style PP that requires producers, broadcasters and advertisers to work more collaboratively. Beyond has already achieved this in Germany for its client Hasbro, which wanted to target its foam gun, the NERF blaster, at a young male audience.

“The second series of the German version of The Office was being filmed and we identified an opportunity for the product to appear within this – in scenes when the characters are messing around with the gun at their desks,” says Morris.

Germany sold out of NERF blasters half way through the second series, although the product appeared throughout the run.

Morris also notes that second-screen applications and connected-TV applications are part of Beyond’s clients’ media plans for next year – another development that could give PP an added boost. The possibility of using a second screen or a connected TV to buy or find out more about that coffee machine strategically placed behind Phil Vickery while he makes a shepherd’s pie may just be a click away.

TIMELINE – PRODUCT PLACEMENT DEALS

February 2011

• Ofcom revises its broadcasting code to allow paid-for product placement on UK television for the first time. • ITV’s This Morning becomes the UK’s first paid-for product placement when Nestlé pays a reported £100,000 to place the Dolce Gusto coffee machine onto the daytime show for 13 weeks.

March 2011

• Channel 4 signs first product- placement deal with New Look clothes and branding to appear in T4 fashion show.

August 2011

• Touchstone Pictures signs product-placement deal to feature movie Fright Night on C5’s Big Brother ahead of its theatrical release.

November 2011

• Nationwide cashpoint features in Coronation Street for four months; then renewed for 12.

May 2012

• Hollyoaks signs Nokia product-placement deal. The soap will feature Nokia Lumia smartphones on screen in a four-month deal.

June 2012

• Supermarket chain Morrisons becomes first Big Brother shopping supplier in what is reported to be a “six-fi gure deal” with Initial and C5. • C4 agrees “major product-placement deals” for Uncle Ben’s rice and Yeo Valley yoghurt, both of which feature in Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals.

July 2012

• ITV signs a deal with Welcome to Yorkshire to feature its promotional material in context ually relevant places around Emmerdale.

September 2012

• Galaxy Note 2 has a presence on The X Factor following a deal between Syco, Fremantle and ITV. • ITV and B&Q announce an agreement that includes a new B&Q kitchen on the set of This Morning.

October 2012

• Digital-PP company MirriAd and brand-evaluation company Repucom launch new partnership technology for Deal Or No Deal in the UK.

Jan 2013

• Maximuscle signs PP deal for Celebrity BB. • Very.co.uk products, including branded dressing gowns, are set to feature in the Big Brother house with click-to-buy placement on the Channel 5 website. • DFS sofa makes its first appearance on This Morning. The deal, understood to be worth a low six-figure sum, was brokered by DFS’s media agency MediaCom’s Beyond Advertising division. • Highland Spring becomes first brand to feature in ITV’s Dancing On Ice.

May 2013

• ITV, Lime Pictures and the- 7stars announce an agreement with Ministry of Sound for the first paid-for placement of a brand in TOWIE.

 

May 23 Press Release

London Evening Standard – The Great Gatsby Gamble

gatsby

After his adaptation was put on ice in 2008, a desperate Baz Luhrmann decided there was only one thing for it: get the luxury brands to back his glitzy romp. In doing so he created a new model for film financing — brand integration.

gatsby

17 May 2013 – Stephen Armstrong

The Great Gatsby is all about money: old money vs new money, fake money vs real money, but mainly just money. Buckets of the stuff. Baz Luhrmann’s cinematic spectacle is a tale of heavy spending — wild parties, elegant costumes and crazy booty-shaking to frantic dance music — and that’s just the making of the film.

If you’re planning to see it at the cinema this weekend, you will see the money oozing from the screen: bespoke Miu Miu and Prada 1920s-style cocktail dresses dripping with crystals and fur; glittering diamond-studded headpieces, cufflinks, bracelets and necklaces from Tiffany & Co; 500 suits and 1,700 accessories handmade by Brooks Brothers; MAC lipstick and foundation; Fogal stockings; luxury suites at New York’s Plaza hotel. And everything drowning in Moët & Chandon champagne.

The film’s co-producer Graham Burke, CEO of Australian media company Village Roadshow, says the film has set a new benchmark for promotional tie-ups with luxury brands. Industry experts agree: ‘If content is king, then brands are the palace guards. Brands are what matter most in Hollywood’s future. They’re like manna from heaven,’ says Robert Friedman, a former executive at New Line Cinema, now president of Radical Media.

‘Product placement is as old as Hollywood itself,’ says Stacy Jones, CEO of Hollywood Branded, who secured BlackBerry’s role in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. ‘But I think we’re about to see its heyday. You’ve got a fragmented audience, a tight financial situation, and producers realising that they need real partners — not just someone who writes them a cheque so the Chevy logo features in a scene.’

Although product placement dotted the Marx Brothers and Fatty Arbuckle movies of the 1920s and 1930s, and featured in the first film to win an Oscar, the big cash deals of the modern era began when Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces paid Steven Spielberg $1 million to feature the sweet with which Elliott lures ET from the woods. By 2005, over 35 companies paid to appear in Michael Bay’s The Island — only to be beaten by his Transformers in 2009, which had 47 paid-for logos on screen. In 2011, Morgan Spurlock’s Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold led to brands themselves joining in the mocking of product placement. Since then, people have stopped talking about product placement —the buzzwords now are ‘brand integration’.

To see the future, visit The Great Gatsby’s website with its online ‘Guide to style’ and you’ll find plugs and documentaries in which the film’s stars Carey Mulligan, Elizabeth Debicki and Joel Edgerton enthuse over the Tiffany props and Brooks Brothers costumes. Or flick through the tabloid pictures of the glamorous stars at the fabulous premiere party in Cannes this week, brought to you by Moët & Chandon.Gatsby’s alliance with Fairmont Hotels sees The Plaza in New York host a Moët pop-up bar and a weekly ‘Gatsby Hour’ featuring live jazz, a speakeasy menu, and a Fitzgerald Suite that delivers an immersive Gatsby experience. In London, Fairmont’s Savoy hotel has launched a special cocktail in the American Bar. Even Harrods has bought into this new Gatsby mythology, theming its window displays — argu-ably the most important shopfront in the world — with trailers, official artwork and costumes, and replacing its green flags with Gatsby ones featuring the film’s Art Deco black and gold emblem. Inside, there are themed flower displays, Prada-clothed mannequins, and 1920s music.

To join a movie these days, brands don’t just hand over cash — in many cases they don’t even hand over cash. They become a central player, from research to props to set, and, most importantly, easing that very costly marketing spend. Just look at the Tiffany adverts currently peppering magazines and newspapers, advertising its special Gatsby collection — and also including the release date of the film.

It’s hard to get accurate figures — the deals are fiendishly complicated and shrouded in secrecy — but the promotional tie-ins on Gatsby could be worth as much as $25 million all told, including free designer dresses, vintage bottles and jewels, free location shoots and mass-produced costumes for extras. Prada and Brooks Brothers designing and making most of the costumes will have shaved close to $2 million off the producers’ spending, for instance; essentially, the wardrobe department has been outsourced.

‘Moët helped the production with period bottle labels and extensive archive research, the giant bottles you see showgirls picking up, as well as possibly in the region of $40,000 of its product at cost,’ explains Darryl Collis, director of Moët’s London-based product placement agency Seesaw. ‘Moët also supported the premiere and the Cannes party. It’s a good fit — cinema has a young, affluent audience andGatsby is an aspirational film. Different markets can place different promotional support behind the tie-in, too.’

Collis, who also helped the upmarket biker-wear company Belstaff reach number three on the most-placed brand in Hollywood list last year (behind Mercedes and Apple), explains that heavy promotion online, on TV and in store by MAC, Brooks Brothers, Tiffany, Fogal, Fairmont and Moët is a key part of the contract, helping to rope in a brand-new audience for a movie set in the 1920s. ‘If you’re talking to producers these days, they’re really wanting you to bring something like a $5 million TV campaign to the table,’ he explains. Prada hasn’t planned an extensive media campaign around the film in return for its appearance, but it does have a Gatsby-inspired line on sale.’

A so-called ‘360 deal’ like this worked for last year’s Bond movie Skyfall. Product placement from Sony Vaio to Coke Zero and Heineken were old-school pay-to-play deals, earning some $45 million. For Tom Ford and Omega watches, however, supplying kit and campaigns was key. Omega created a limited-edition Skyfall Seamaster, which it sold for close to $7,000, with accompanying co-branded advertising featuring Daniel Craig. TV commercials by Sony, Omega and Heineken added to the extensive marketing from distributor Sony, making the film James Bond’s highest-grossing movie, the biggest box-office hit the UK has ever known and the seventh highest-grossing film of all time. ‘The simple fact is that without the brands, we couldn’t make the film,’ justified Craig to fans outraged at Bond drinking lager. ‘It’s unfortunate but that’s how it is. This movie costs a lot of money to make; it costs nearly as much again, if not more, to promote, so we go where we can.’

Gatsby proves his point: the troubled birth of the movie, the complicated arrangements with brands, the full-on hip-hop-Jazz-Age-decadent lurch towards swimming-pool suicide is a perfect metaphor for Hollywood’s current perilous grip on the skyscraper of popular culture. At the start of the 21st century, the US movie industry was shrugging off the threat of internet piracy seriously affecting the record business and getting ready for blockbuster boom time — DVD sales were soaring, while private equity funds and other big-bucks investors were chucking cash at the screen. The party was still going on when Baz Luhrmann pitched his adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel to Sony. And then — just like in the 1920s — the crash came. Financiers disappeared, DVD sales plummeted by $3 billion between 2004 and 2010, and production costs soared — the average cost of a studio movie rose from $42 million in 1995 to $80 million in 2011. All of which posed a problem for the Australian director’s $105 million budget.

In July 2011, two major movie projects juddered to a halt thanks to budget pressures. Walt Disney stalled The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp, even though sets were already half-built in New Mexico, and Universal pulled out of The Dark Tower, a three-movie, two-TV-series colossus based on books by Stephen King. Around the same time, Luhrmann flew from Sydney to LA to try to save The Great Gatsby from collapse. Sony was cutting his budget down to $80 million and insisting on partners to share the risk (Australia, the director’s last passion project, had struggled at the box office but made up the shortfall on DVD sales). Luhrmann pitched to and won Warners’ executives round in a marathon meeting. His secret weapon? His wife.

Catherine Martin has been production designer on every major Luhrmann film, including Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge!. She persuaded Miuccia Prada to design Leonardo DiCaprio’s chainmail for 1996’s Romeo + Juliet and helped secure an unprecedented tie-in with the Swiss luxury-goods maker Montblanc, and Piper-Heidsieck champagne, for Luhrmann’s 2002 Broadway production of La Bohème, complete with on-stage references, in return for magazine ads and mailings. Both she and her husband insist that all partnerships in Gatsby are rooted in the original story and Fitzgerald’s life, with the exception of Prada, which launched its first women’s clothing line in the late 1980s. ‘Fitzgerald had a relationship with Tiffany in a big way,’ Luhrmann told The Wall Street Journal this month. ‘In This Side of Paradise there’s that great line: “You must go to Brooks and get yourself a nice suit.” If you wanted to show off that you had the good stuff during Prohibition, you smuggled in Moët. And the 1922 vintage was a particularly good year. There were a lot of things we said no to.’

So how much can the brands expect to claw back? For Tiffany: ‘Its investment must be in the region of $10 million, not to mention all the parties and stuff it’s done in sync with it. It’s a long-term return the company is after,’ says one marketing agency director. It has also launched a collection inspired by the film, in collaboration with Catherine Martin.

All of this promotion is a survival issue for Luhrmann. After La Bohème flopped and his epic Alexander the Great biopic, also starring DiCaprio, was canned, he says he briefly considered suicide. And Warner has a poor track record when it comes to launching movies in May: Poseidon, Speed Racer and Dark Shadows all crashed in the Gatsby slot, drowned out  by the buzz surrounding their rivals, Mission: Impossible III, Iron Man and Avengers Assemble respectively. He’s hoping the extra buzz  created by Miuccia and co will help the movie stand out against Iron Man 3’s larger marketing spend from Sony (Iron Man’s product placement tie-ins are more traditional — Audi paid $10 million to be Tony Stark’s car of choice but, awkwardly, Honda secured the rights to the Avengers series, meaning Robert Downey Jr swaps brands depending on the movie title).

Anders Granath, co-founder of Propaganda GEM, which secured Fogal’s place inGatsby and Audi’s in Iron Man, prefers the new, highly intimate way of doing business. ‘Because of the kind of muddled landscape raised by these cash bidding wars, the most attractive properties are now ones that have never had a partnership,’ he explains. ‘Relationships with stars — like Gucci with Florence Welch — extend into social media, Facebook… that’s the kind of collaborative relationship brands want with movies.’

‘We know everything — movies, sports events, music videos — everything that’s available that’s being planned for the next four years,’ explains Stacy Jones. ‘We have producers phoning us at script stage, sometimes even when they’re trying to finance their movie. Our team is on various set locations every day and our partners include every major studio.’

For Fitzgerald, this kind of money would certainly have helped. The novel’s poor sales marked the start of his reliance on sensational short stories and Hollywood script work to pay for his heavy drinking and his wife’s medical bills. He unloaded the Gatsby film rights for $16,000 and didn’t live to see it hailed as the quintessential American novel. He died a penniless alcoholic, which suggests that Luhrmann’s strategy is the better one: don’t pay for the b

 ooze, have the booze pay you, and put it on the screen.

May 15 All News

New Poster and Trailer for Richard Curtis’ ‘About Time’

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Here’s the brand new trailer and poster for ‘About Time’ starring Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander, Margot Robbie and directed by Richard Curtis.

At the age of 21, Tim is told an incredible family secret by his father – that all the men in his family have the ability to travel in time. He can relive any moment in his life to try things differently until he gets them perfectly right.

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