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Product Placement
Introduction
We now have much more control over how we consume media. This has created problems for the advertising industry. If we don’t want to see an advertisement then we no longer have to. We can fast-forward over the adverts on TV and increasingly, we simply download TV shows with the adverts edited out. Advertising in magazines has always had to work very hard to catch our attention as we skip through the pages to the articles that we wish to read.
Here are 3 ways in which the advertising industry has responded to this problem:
- Pay people to watch the advertisements. A new mobile phone service called Blyk is aimed at teenagers and offers them free phone calls in return for watching advertisements on their mobile phones. Marti Guixé designed some sponsored food. The idea is that the food is free to the consumer because it is paid for by the company that advertises its brand upon it.
- Target the advertisements so carefully, that people are happy to receive them because they become a valuable source of information. Google Ads try to do this.
- Integrate the advertising into the medium so completely, that it becomes impossible to separate it from the fabric of the media or environment in which it sits. This technique removes our ability to choose whether we see the advertisement or not because the world in which we live and the advertisement become the same thing. Its this third technique that we’d like you to explore, but first, some examples:
Here is a proposal for an advertisement designed by Masahiko Sato and Norio Nakamura. Its not just a billboard on a building, it is the actual water supply for the building.
A radical advertisement by Masahiko Sato and Norio Nakamura from their book.
Here’s an advert that is not only located in a children’s playground, it forms part of the playground. Mothers watch their children slide down beautiful, smooth, silky hair.
Example found via Keri Smith.
Lastly, here’s an advertisement for McDonalds. Its not an “advertisement feature” in which a fake article is written about a product by the editorial team of a newspaper. This advertisement is purely optical. In order to read some serious articles about immigration, and international relations, you have to stare at some french fries.
Example found via Keri Smith.
Task
Design a series of advertisements for a product or brand of your choice that are integrated as tightly as possible within their environment. Ideally the advertisements will be inseparable from the world around them: impossible to ignore, fast-forward or skip over.
Teaching graphics at Central Saint Martins | Microbrands brief
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