product placement in music videos

product placement.

A common convention of music videos is product placement, this can get the producers of the music video a lot of money from featuring that product in their music video, especially since the most viewed music video, "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi, has almost 3.8 billion views, half the population of the earth, thus the global reach that these music videos have has huge potential, compared to traditional television adverts, and advertisers have realized that.

A successful example of product placement in a music video was shown in Coldplay's "adventure of a lifetime", where the latest "Beats By Dre" Bluetooth speaker, Pills, was shown in the introduction of the song, clearly displaying the iconic "b" logo in a close up shot. The gorillas find this speaker in the jungle, and it starts playing Adventure Of A Lifetime, showing off its sound quality as even when under a pile of leaves the music is very clear. This is clever as Beats are fairly notorious for being actually quite bad quality sound compared to cheaper products, with their brand image being the fact that celebrities are seen with these products from product placement

 The fact it's before the actual song means viewers are forced to watch this to get to what they clicked on the video for. This is an example of synergy between Beats and Coldplay, both getting mutual benefit (Beats get huge promotion from being at the start of a viral music video, and Coldplay can benefit by using the funding to use a digital motion capture studio with expensive motion control technology, creating the realistic dancing apes.)





Another advantage to Beats of appearing in a Coldplay video, is that Coldplay have a very positive brand image, their songs are usually associated with happiness and there band has practically no bad publicity. Hence the collaboration with Coldplay may increase Beats reputation and brand image. However many fans of coldplay on social media and online forums criticized them for the blatant, in your face style product placement, and that they had sold out from what they had originally stood for, so for band it may the opposite affect. For example the popular music website "Joe.co.uk" claimed "Coldplay's new video is genius... but do they really need such blatent product placement?" and due to the Indie genre's attitude towards product placement, it's likely my target audience would react in the same way.



The music video ended up getting over 580 million views on YouTube, and once again traditional television advertising would never come close to this viewing figure. In many cases the only reason the music video is made is due to product placement funding it, this is because music is worth less money today. Music videos used to exist to promote their songs, but the actual value of them songs is worth less now, because people can listen to music for free on youtube, or just illegally download music (95% of music is illegally dowloaded). the less revenue that conglomerates like Sony get from music is compensated by the increase in the prices of merchandise and concert tickets, and obviously, the increased product placement.

This wasn't the case in 1981, as MTV had a monopoly over the music video market, as they were the only ones who had the licences to play these music videos, and were the only way for people to listen to the songs for free, instead of buying CDs or Cassettes. and obviously youtube hadn't been a way to look at music until about 2005 and onwards, during this time there was still a small presense of reality tv shows on MTV, but the culture of the web 2.0 and prosumerism meant this wasn't a problem  that MTV had to deal with.

Norris's example of music
video product placement.

In my music video, I am going to use product placement having "Endless" as my IPhone background screen. this was the title of my film that I made an opening for in my AS coursework, and the film would get more exposure if shown in a popular music video. I got this idea from my analysis of Ben Norris's music video on YouTube, in which he had a close up point of view shot on his phone of the film poster for the film "The Rabbit Proof Fence", this is an effective example of product placement, and would be an effective use of intertextuality as it is easy to put it in without being off putting for the audience, and
obviously the funding from my film company
"shock productions" would be used in funding
the production of the video. I feel that the genre
of my music video would suit this subtle product
placement, as indie rock videos aren't focussed
on product placement as much as pop videos are,
trying to "stick to roots" and the reduced popularity
they have, in terms of view numbers, could make
the product placement less successful.

Update

I have decided to use a can of coke as an example of product placement for my music video. This was  fairly easy to incorporate into my music video, as I could just slowly pan left in an extreme close up of the can, to get the entire product in the frame. The fact that the coca cola can is the only example of product placement in the can, gives would also give Coca Cola an element of exclusivity, and heighten the effect of the product placement.