Product Placements, Food

A product placement refers to the practice of placing a particular brand of a product in a movie. Many people recall a small boy leaving a trail of Reese's Pieces from a shed where an alien was hiding to the boy's house (indeed, people are probably more likely to remember the name of the candy than the boy's [Page 676]name—Elliot). The consumption of Reese's Pieces increased by about 67% within a few months of the opening of the movie, E.T. Of course, generic candy (or even a fruit such as grapes) could have been used to draw the alien into the house.

Product placements are becoming increasingly popular; a recent content analysis of prime-time television found that, on average, there were close to 30 brand appearances per hour of prime-time programming. Indeed, products are placed in video games as well. Donkey Kong does not use just any banana—he uses Chiquita bananas.

One reason product placements are so popular may be that brand placement overcomes the problem of “zapping.” A person is less likely to run to the kitchen when Reese's Pieces are being placed on the ground by a little boy during a movie than when a commercial is run for Reese's Pieces. Second, brand placements have a longer lifetime than typical advertisements. With the release of the 20th anniversary E.T., Hershey's placement of Reese's Pieces may continue to be effective 20 years after the initial placement.

Much of the academic research has focused on the influence of product placements on memory of brands placed within movies or TV shows. The initial research was mixed. Sometimes, people showed very good memory of placements whereas other times, they recalled very few placements. More recently, researchers have started looking at implicit memory of product placements. Implicit memory involves demonstrating an effect of earlier exposure to a brand without explicitly asking people to remember what they saw earlier. For example, people may be asked to complete a series of word problems where they fill in missing letters to complete a word. This is called a word fragment completion task. For example, to test if people had implicit memory of Sprite in the movie, The Client, they were presented with a series of word puzzles including “S__ RI__ E.” Research found that people who had seen the movie were more likely to complete the word fragment with SPRITE than people who had not seen the movie. Product placements consistently result in improved implicit memory for the products placed in a movie or video game.

The concern with food product placements is that they may be contributing to the alarming increase in childhood and adolescent obesity seen in the United States. Statistics suggest that as many as 15% of youth in the United States are obese. Rates of obesity are increasing at alarming rates. For example, the percentage of obese 6-to-11-year-olds increased from about 4% in the 1960s to 15.3% in 2000. The Surgeon General predicts that obesity may replace smoking as the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States.

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