Ethical Issues in Product Placement

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Ethical Issues in Product Placement Introduction Product placement is a way of marketing communication that attracts growing interest by many advertisers because of its great effectiveness and has been widely used in various fields like movies, TV series and TV shows in recent years. The definitions of it are vary from different scholar literatures. For instance, “the purposeful incorporation of brands into editorial content” (Karrh, 1998; Russell and Belch, 2005; Schneider and Cornwell, 2005) or “brand placement is the inclusion of brands in movies or television scripts” (Ferraro and Avery, 2000). According to Olswang’s “Product Placement A Guide to the New Rules” in 2011, "Product placement" is defined as the inclusion of, or of a reference to, a product, service or trade mark in a programme, where the inclusion is for a commercial purpose and in return for payment or other valuable consideration to the applicable broadcaster or on-demand service provider or the producer of the programme (or any person connected to them) (Olswang, 2011). Many academic literature figure that product placement occurred and developed prior to the 1980s (Newell J, Salmon C T, Chang S, 2006) while some argued that it was not structured until been successfully operated in movies like E.T. which intermixed artistic and commercial into a great work(Miller, 1990a, 1990b) In essence, product placement has a long history that the first product insertion took place in 1896 - - when film was still just a motion pictures (Lavanchy-Clarke, 1922, cited in Newell J, Salmon C T, Chang S, 2008, P575-597) Because experiments have showed that product placement is more effective than common advertisement (Gupta P B, Lord K R, 1998), more and more clients are fond of this kind of promotional strategy in recent years. From the first product placement in the world - - two women were washing clothes
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