For anyone that has seen Britney Spears’s new video for “Hold It Against Me” you can understand that it summarizes the growing ideology of using music videos for palpable product placement. Her video spares no view on the placement for dating websites and big technological brands.
When Spears’s new video was premiered it was everything you would assume you could find in a Britney video. She was dancing in an underwear-like garment with semi-naked men dancers surrounding her. With the usual Britney effects it did however include a few new ideas for cashing in big buck – product placement. In one scene Britney is being lifted upward through a giant cylinder tunnel looking room that is filled from top to bottom with Sony TVs and monitors.
The more you watch the video the more you realize that you cannot avoid the fact that the Sony brand is blatantly displayed throughout the entire video. From the Sony TVs and the Sony logo being flashed numerous times throughout the entire video to the PlentyOfFish dating website that Britney explores and finds a man on make it extremely hard not to make notice of the subliminal advertising that is not so subliminal. If you watch the video below and scroll to 1:34 and 2:40 you will see the obvious placement of both these companies. It was estimated that Spears made over $500,000 alone on the placement of these advertisements in her video.
We know that music video product placement is becoming a growing trend, not only from Spears’s video but Lady Gaga’s as well. In her “Telephone” music video, the diva also featured the free-to-use dating site PlentyOfFish, Diet Coke and Virgin Mobile. I think that product placement in videos is going to become one of the best ways to sell a product.
After doing some research on the advertisements in Spears’s video, according to PopEater (www.PopEater.com), “Plenty Of Fish has reported a 20 percent increase in traffic to their site since Spears debuted her video last week.” It was not until I was eating dinner at a family friend’s house that I realized how genius music video product placement was. I was sitting at the table and my friend Tina had been telling me about this new dating website she had heard of and how her co-worker had found success on this new dating website which happened to be PlentyOfFish (Tina had never seen Britney or Gaga’s video and didn’t know the product had been placed in either of them). She then proceeded to tell me that since her co-worker found success her boss had followed her and explored the site as well. Tina explained how both women had gone on numerous dates with the men they found on the website and were currently still seeing them. When I got home from dinner I was online networking and it was by a fluke that I came across Spears’s video. I decided to watch it and my mouth dropped when I saw the PlentyOfFish website placed in the video. It was then I knew where these co-workers had found the video and how impactful these product placements are which led me to this blog.
I find it mere genius that celebrities would charge for product placement in their videos and/or television shows. If one celebrity is not using this form of profit, another will. It leads us to the question why we are using it – it is because it works!
Truly,
Tiffany
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