7th: I’ve got Pac-Man Fever and Brands Are Driving Me Crazy

Beside movies, another very similar medium that becomes increasingly more important to advertisers are games. When games first came into the focus of companies they were mainly used as promotional material and given away for free.  A prominent example is the Coca-Cola version of Space Invaders (1983) in which the player has to shoot down a Pepsi logo.

Furthermore, product placement began to quickly emerge in games which picture a real world environment that usually features adverts. As the player pretty much expects the advertisement it does not interrupt the game but even conveys additional realism. A good example is the 1994 game Fifa International Soccer which featured billboard advertising.

Today, the increasing success of consoles like the Nintendo Wii brings the medium into the living room, making it attractive for a much broader audience than hardcore computer nerds. By 2014 the revenue for in-game advertising is expected to exceed $ 1 billion making it impossible for brands to ignore.

If you compare games to movies there are three interesting aspects that I want to highlight: First, games feature a completely man-made reality. This means that everything has to be designed down to the tiniest detail. In a movie a sports car could be represented by various suitable brands regardless of whether they pay for product placement or not. Especially for low and mid-profile productions it will sometimes simply come down to what kind of car is available. In a computer game however the car could be designed with any branding or even without one, therefore making the decision if or how to brand a car a more deliberate process.

Second, a game can create a higher immersion than a movie, even resulting in a mental state that Csíkszentmihályi’s described as Flow. This is important as we can now apply psychological models to predict advertising effectiveness and suggest appropriate strategies.

For example, the elaboration likelihood model demonstrates that people are more likely to process logical arguments in a state of high involvement. A practical implication for in-game advertising would be to not only include visual stimuli of products but more in-depth information as well. A good example is EA’s Need for Speed series, which contains product placement for cars. Besides having fairly realistic models of the cars the player can also find lots of background information. This strategy has been especially pursued in “Need for Speed: Porsche” which features “an in-depth catalogue of different Porsche parts”.

Third, in-game advertising can be dynamic. Unlike movies, the content of games can be easily manipulated, e.g. by installing an update or by downloading content from the Internet on demand. This can be interesting for advertisers as they can create in-game advertising campaigns that run for a limited time at a high intensity. Furthermore, the ads can be interactive, e.g. the player can retrieve background information on a product that interests him or be directed to an online store for immediate purchase.

Alright, thank God I had written this blog before the last discussion group session, just didn’t published it yet. Due to this I could use my knowledge about it in my presentation. I was lucky: I got the “Red Bull Gives You Wings”-paper.

According to Brasel and Gips (2011) they showed “that brand exposure can have double-sided effects on behaviour”. You can associate both positive and negative effects on objective consumer performance. “Double-edged effects of branding on consumer performance could be increasingly important as ambient advertising and product cobranding become more commonplace.”

Are you a video game user? If yes, do you recognize the branding in it? Playing a racing-game, do you prefer a particular branded car? And what do you think about the “flow”-Experience during a video game?

For now I’m just hoping to get a flow during my studies just as if I was playing a video game :) See you next week.

Thank you for your attention…!

P.S. And for everyone who also has the Pac-Man Fever… just sing a little bit ;)

6th: The greatest brain surgery ever sold… not?!

In one of my earlier entries I mentioned some facts about the history and development of product placement in movies. I also mentioned one particular movie:

This is some kind of documentary directed by Morgan Spurlock (Maybe you know him, because of his very popular movie “Super Size Me” from 2004), and is probably one of the most extreme examples of product placement.

I’m not sure if anyone of you knows this movie (I didn’t before I start my research for this blog) but it basically takes a meta-perspective on advertising: the whole plot revolves around Spurlock interviewing company representatives if they would like to advertise in his new movie (which consists of exactly these interviews). So the whole film is financed by advertising and sponsorship. Spurlock tries to activate the desire in our minds and brains. His goal is to evoke a subliminal stimulation by a perfect product placement (for further information read this interesting article “Beyond Vicary’s fantasies: The impact of subliminal priming and brand choice” written by Johan C. Karremans et al., 2006).

The film wasn’t really successful with only 638.000$ in box office sales compared to 11.530.000$ for Spurlock’s earlier movie “Super Size Me”. Also, from the people I asked no one knew the movie. The list of sponsors does not really read impressive as well: Wikipedia has an extensive list of all the brands but I have to admit I only know two of them (Merrell and Mini).

However, despite its poor reception the film contains a series of interesting topics. Amongs other things that I noticed I want to highlight one particular point:

When Spurlock wants to create a really good trailer for his movie (remember, it’s a meta-perspective…;) he uses “a new technique called neuromarketing”. So he decides to visit the brand-guru Martin Lindstrom (whom we should all be familiar with) and he states that “trailers are now more and more produced based on neuromarketing”.

Maybe it is too early to call “Neurocinematics” a new disciplin but this is a term “coined by Uri Hasson at Princeton University, who was among the first to investigate how the brain responds to movies using an fMRI brain scanner.”

But I am sure that this type of new “science” is getting more and more used. Proof of that would be the agenda of the Topanga Filmfestival, which took place from 28th to 31st of July in California, USA. Besides several more ordinary topics they also expected discussions and lectures about movies and movie making according to neuromarketing:

• Neuromarketing – Invasive? Scientifically proven? Why are Hollywood Studios using this type of focus group technique? Will it change the way we tell stories?
• What happens in our brain when we become emotionally involved in a film?
• How movies manipulates the prefrontal cortex and evokes subliminal reactions

Seven neuroscientists attended this festival and the audience could use brain scanners themselves. They had the opportunity to watch different video clips and to measure and discuss the resulting brain activity with the neuroscientists.

But this isn’t the first attempt to use neuromarketing in the film industry. 2006 some well-known Hollywood filmmakers used brain imaging to look into the human brain. The goal was to evaluate the audience’s preferences. Furthermore they wanted to create prognoses about how much a spectator remembers of a movie trailer and if the interest in the trailers is affected by different directors, topics, styles etc.

In the following video you can see a brain-imaging during watching the “AVATAR“-trailer.

From my point of view it is a very interest topic and maybe a great job to work in it after the studies :), but still I am not sure if it is effective and especially efficient? Just think about the immense effort and costs to test things like that. Questionnaires are maybe more boring but still much cheaper! The “Neurocinematists” will have to demonstrate that their method provides additional value over traditional evaluations.

Of course I am aware of the critics about collecting quantitative and qualitatitve data in traditional ways but this whole new “brain techniques” have a lot of disadvantages as well:

• By using fMRIs the participants are never in their usual environment, so the results can only be generalised with great caution (cf. “Neuromarketing: brain scam or valuable tool?“ written by Amanda Wilkinson).
• In a fMRI study you can only research brain areas that are known to your machines and there is still a lot of unknown territory. The findings can not be applied to the whole population because of the very small sample sizes: the way decisions are made can differ in great way (and therefore also the neural activity in experiments) and is dependent on factors such as culture.
• The ‘hype’ for neuromarketing makes it seem a lot more than it actually is.

And even the great Brand guru Lindstrom makes mistakes as you can see in the New York Times.

Especially when you watched the excerpt of the movie above (here are the quotes):

So please find the mistake :) Just an ironical hint: No, wise-shiny-and-Greatest-Brand-Guru-ever-sold-Mr. Lindstrom, there is no way by interviewing you to get this … oh what did you say before? You remember that Morgan SAID he wants to drink a coke after the brain scan?! Oooh, oops…!

Alright, so what do you think about this “new disciplin”? What advantages or disadvantages can you find for producing movie trailers in such a way? Did you know the “Greatest Movie Ever Sold” before you read this blog? If so, what is your opinion about the movie?

Thank you for your attention…!

5th: Dr. Strangelove or: How they Glorified the Atomic Bomb

One of the most featured brands in movies is one that is not associated with product placement right away: The military. The Pentagon’s public relation department realised the emotional and mind shaping power of movies early on and began investing in product placement as early as the 1920’s. By the time of the second world war it had become an important recruiting instrument. Later the Vietnam conflict inspired a series of anti-war movies that were not approved and therefore not supported by the military (Full Metal Jacket, 1987; Platoon, 1986; Apocalypse Now, 1979; The Deer Hunter, 1978) .

However, the 1986 movie Top Gun (starring Tom Cruise as a likeable pilot) showed the airforce in a much more positive light and started to reshape the public perception of the military.
Today, one of the directors most involved in polishing the army’s profile is Micheal Bay. While he states that he is keen on the realism brought to the set by real soldiers and military vehicles he has obviously no concerns about diverting some of the creative control in return. This is claimed by the army as it’s not only interested in having soldiers and military themes featured in Hollywood productions but also very concerned about how they are presented. The tight approval process for Pentagon sponsored movies results in censorship of productions that are dependent on military support.

The involvement of the military in movie productions is well documented, in various books as well as in TV documentries. And while it is generally accepted as a legitimate way to deliver the audience more “bang for their bucks” by filming with authentic military personal and equipment it can still cause controversies such as the recent partnership of the army with the moviemakers of X-Men: First Class (2011). The military created their own trailer with footage from the movie, suggesting that by joining the army one could gain almost supernatural powers.

Another critical aspect of the Hollywood-Pentagon partnership is self-censorship. Hollywood’s glorification of the army may be the result of misplaced american patriotism for one but it is most certainly also driven by screen writers who are supposed to produce scripts suited to the military approval process. This goes as far as staging the nuclear bomb not as a weapon of mass destruction but as an important tool for the survival of mankind. In Roland Emmerich‘s “Independence Day” (1996) it is our last resort for defeating the aliens and in movies like “Deep impact” (1998) or “Armageddon” (1998) it saves the world by blowing up Astroids. On the other hand, movies that deal with the still existing nuclear threat (like Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove (1964) or James Cameron‘s Terminator series) got surprisingly rare.

Alright, what do you think about it? Did you recognize the military product placement in these kind of movies or do you feel that it is more subtle than usual?

Thank your for your attention…

P.S. …and here for the real cineasts and weird guys: The great and freaky trailer of “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”

*some references used except for internet sources:

• Lawrence, J.S., 2005. Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. The Journal of American Culture, 28, pp.329-331.
• Valantin, J-M. (2005). Hollywood, the Pentagon and Washington: The movies and national security from World War II to the present day. London: Anthem
• And of course the CBS-documentation („How the Hollywood movies censored or meddled with by the Pentagon?“, Oct 04, 2004), which I linked in the above text