The Effectiveness of Product Placement in a Virtual World

Roberto Celot Dissertation IV Virtual Product Placement Introduction A development in technology has made it much easier for people to ignore typical messages. Firms need to look for a new alternative to acquire the mind of the consumers. PP in movies is one of the answer advertisers have found. In media and entertainment environment PP is the inclusion of brand (McCarty 2004). PP has been used widely in entertainment media, like TV programs and films (Gould and Gupta 2006). Since PP is became a common practice in the media many studies have been done on how people react with this type of stealth adv. messages (Russell and Stern 2006). The way consumers’ process PP in fact completely differs from the way they process the traditional adv. Firstly, consumers quickly recognize traditional adv., and therefore they become skeptical and aware of the persuasion mechanism from the brand message. That can give to the advertisement a low effect (MacLachlan 2005). Instead PP is rather less likely to activate these defense mechanisms (Grigorovici, Constantin 2004). Secondly, the traditional adv. is usually the main focus of the viewer. On PP instead, the viewer has the main focus on the entertainment media and not on the adv. message. Hence, in a PP Brand messages are placed inside of the media, that’s require from the consumers more attentional resource to capture and analyse the stealth message. All the researches carried out on PP are concentrated on the position of the brand inside the media in movies and TV show. Quite often the early research reported that people could recognize brands that were showed in the movies (Steortz 1987), but the memory rates tended to differ by film and brand (Karrh 1994). Recent researchers have focused on factors that might have an effect on recalling PP (Russell 2002). The main points examined in these studies were applied to areas where the PP was added to the film verbally or visually. In this way researchers wanted to understand how the consumer was influenced by it and how the brand was congruent with the story line of the film (Russell 2002). Other different studies have claimed that when PP is added visually and verbally in the same time helps the consumer to recognize the PP better than just using only the visual factor (Griffin 1994); whereas focal PP gives the best recall in general (Chartier 2000). Currently the attention on PP has begun to move and develop in other media such Videogames (Nelson 2002; Yang et al. 2006). The influence of advertisers’ in on/off line games has seen a huge