The birth of ‘anti’ sponsorship?

The way celebrity endorsements normally work is that a brand will identify someone with a high profile who is respected by core consumers and who embodies what the brand is all about, or wants to be all about.

It’s not always as straightforward as it sounds.

Some brands have teamed up with the most unlikely partners, while others have learned the hard way that celebrities are human too and that means they can make mistakes and decisions that you don’t want your brand associated with.

Not what Nike, Gillette et al signed up for

However, some marriages are made in heaven and can even lead to lucrative co-branded products such as the Nike Air Jordan range that was much desired by a young Zeitgeist.

Given how much kudos or harm a celebrity endorsement can do, Zeitgeist was piqued to read that Abercrombie and Fitch had suggested that they could pay MTV to not allow characters from Jersey Shore to wear their brands as the association was damaging.

One of the inherent dangers of being an aspirational or fashionable brand that is not priced to make it all but inaccessible to the very lucky few is that you will be worn by undesirables who want your brand to rub off on them.

This, combined with the modern phenomenon of reality TV shows and the glorification of the minor celebrity with limited talent but a huge thirst for fame, can result in a brand receiving more exposure from accidental off-brand associations than their much crafted paid for work.

It is to mitigate this kind of damage – and to generate some buzz – that Abercrombie and Fitch have made their proposal.

While offering to pay someone to not associate with your brand might be a simple solution and a reversal of the traditional model of paying someone to endorse your brand, it isn’t particularly creative and Zeitgeist can’t help but wonder it could actually be dangerous.

Now that a precedent has been set, will we now see the smarter minor celebrities attempt to ‘extort’ lucrative ‘anti-sponsorship’ arrangements with brands who would want nothing to do with them.

With marketing budgets already modest, we hope not.

Product Placement’s Unknown Unknowns

Zeitgeist has commented on product placement several times before, including its bumpy ride to legality on British television (this summer the House of Lords debated its worth), as well as the contextual advertising that takes place on television sets in the US.

Advertising on British television certainly needs a jolt. The amount of money spent on original British programming by advertisers has declined £300m, from £2.9bn in 2004 to £2.6bn today. This figure comes from Mark Thompson at the BBC, at a speech given at the Edinburgh festival recently. One solution to these pains, suggests Brand Republic, is ad-funded programming [AFP].

TV executives used to be extremely snobby about working with advertisers, fearing they would want a programme about the joys of baked beans or the absorption power of nappies.
But this view is changing as programme-makers realise their ivory-tower attitude does sophisticated modern marketers a huge disservice.

This is a potentially lucrative avenue. It creates opportunities for both product and programming that are mutually beneficial. The possibilites of funding from brands for content however are potentially fraught with danger for consumers, and the article concludes quite rightly that such an approach is still a way off.

Holistically, product placement is on course for a compound annual expansion rate of 18.2% to 2014 according to PQ Media, “as a result of the economic recovery and a relaxation of formal restrictions”, as written in WARC. The difficulty will be – as Viviane Reding, EU commissioner for information, society and media said in 2006 – in getting “content to drive the advertising”, rather than the other way around. The EU’s premise for product placement transparency is to ensure that consumers always know when such a placement is ocurring while they watch the idiot box. Brandchannel cannily compares this to “how the Dutch make candy commercials display a toothbrush icon to remind kids to brush their teeth after eating sweets.” This may well be scaremongering though; Zeitgeist isn’t aware of any TV shows, rollicking with product placement they may be, where the advertising drives the content, (except perhaps for the odd clip in the video below…) Indeed, in the US some savvy work is going at the moment, for example with the NFL and Febreze. Brandchannel reports “During ESPN’s locker room interviews with NFL players, the product can be seen on the players’ locker shelves — a subtle yet effective product placement.

One of the nastier and more insipid occurrences of product placement, however, might make regulators nervous. The infamous Snooki from the similarly-infamous detritus that is MTV’s Jersey Shore has been the target of reverse product placement, as luxury brands have sought to distance themselves from any association with her by providing her with products and accessories from their rivals. Devious indeed, not to mention ingenious. All of which goes to show that regulators, broadcasters and consumers must be wary about the potential rewards and pitfalls of product placement in the near future.