celebrity rumors | Celebrity Product Placement: A Primer

Celebrity Product Placement: A Primer

It wasn’t until the 20th century that marketers keyed-in on America’s “royalty”: Hollywood. But more often than not they met with disappointing results. Some companies responded only to occasional requests for products (“gifting”), while others made half-hearted attempts to distribute them without first devising a means to guarantee results (“seeding”). In the end, most companies seeded product “to the wind” and failed to grow anything of value.

Those efforts that did succeed, however, were so successful that independent specialists emerged to help companies achieve better results. But the services they offer vary and so do the results.

What’s It All About?

Marketers have long known the power of celebrity to influence consumer-purchasing decisions. The term “borrowed equity” has been used to describe how a celebrity endorsement can bestow upon a product special attributes and cache it might not otherwise have.

The same concept applies to Celebrity Product Placement. But unlike celebrity endorsements, where a highly compensated personality appears in commercial advertising, Celebrity Product Placement offers marketers a more subtle and highly effective means of reaching the public – via the media they consume by choice.

Indeed, Celebrity Product Placement is as much about placing products with celebrities as it is about getting stories about those relationships into the press. Regardless of the approach, Celebrity Product Placement strategies have a common aim: to tie celebrities (thought-leaders, influencers) with consumer products in the public consciousness.

Three different techniques offer three different levels of control over that placement: gifting-the-talent (this usually involves supplying products for gift bags at live events); product seeding (products are distributed more widely in hopes of securing a promotional benefit and kicking off a trend); and, barter relationships (individual celebrities agree to participate in custom programs in exchange for valuable products).

Let’s take a look at each one in greater detail.

GIFTING-THE-TALENT

“Everybody” knows that celebrities own all the coolest stuff, and well before everybody else. Celebrities travel the world and every minute detail of their daily lives pervades the media. As style-leaders, they are perhaps our most powerful influencers. It’s no wonder then that companies are lining up to give them the latest gifts and gadgets for free.

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