Product placement, or embedded marketing, is a form of advertisement, where branded goods or services are placed in a context usually devoid of ads, such as movies, music videos, YouTube shows, the story line of television shows, or news programs. The product placement is often not disclosed at the time that the good or service is featured. Product placement became common in the 1980s. And it's getting more popular ever since.
As with any advertising, its effectiveness tends to be assumed because advertisers continue to use product placement as a marketing strategy. However, some consumer groups such as Commercial Alert object to the practice as "an affront to basic honesty" that they claim is too common in today's society. Commercial Alert asks for full disclosure of all product-placement arrangements, arguing that most product placements are deceptive and not clearly disclosed. It advocates notification before and during television programs with embedded advertisements. One justification for this is to allow greater parental control for children, whom it claims are easily influenced by product placement.The Writers Guild of America, a trade union representing authors of television scripts, had raised objections in 2005 that its members are forced to write ad copy disguised as storyline on the grounds that "the result is that tens of millions of viewers are sometimes being sold products without their knowledge, sold in opaque, subliminal ways and sold in violation of government regulations.
Nicole Scherzinger's videos strike me as the most boldly branded music videos and kind of started a revolution for how obvious the embedded marketing ads. You can see examples of product placement from 3 of her music videos Right there, Poison and Baby love (note these aren't all of the product placements in the videos)
(images included below).
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