Every moviegoer is familiar — sometimes painfully — with paid placements for products like candy and cars. And every marketing person has seen commentary on good — and bad — B2C product placements.
But if you work for a B2B company considering stepping into this unique world, here are six surprising differences.
(As the head of global advertising for a large technology B2B company, a side gig was selective integration projects with movie studios including Marvel, Paramount and Universal.)
Help Them Help You
Once your company or products are known to movie and television producers, they will come knocking on your door. If the project sounds like a viable fit, your first task is to fly to LA, go to the studio lot, sign roughly 837 NDAs, surrender your smartphone and then spend several hours reading a script.
If you’re from Coca-Cola or Aston Martin, the production team won’t need help figuring out placements. They know soda and they know cars.
But, as a B2B brand, they might know very little about what your products do or how they look. Working from the existing script, your task is to find potential integration points that fit naturally within their imaginary world while serving your business goals.
The money people will embrace almost anything to defray the production costs, so they won’t say no. But behind the scenes, the movie people are scared you are going to destroy the magic they’re creating on screen.
I suggest following up on your studio visit by writing a compelling pitch that the money people can bring to the creatives. Sell them (indirectly) on how your brand or product is going to make their scene / set more believable.
Think about the early days of smartphones. Every tech-forward movie character carried an iPhone and Apple never paid a dollar. Why? Because the product helped create the character.
The Four-Quadrant Movie and Your Brand
Hollywood blockbusters are built to appeal to all four audience “quadrants”: men, women, under-25 and over-25 in age. Typical movie placements for candy and soda skew toward younger audiences. Can your product — or your media — reach a different quadrant?
In my case, I commanded large-scale advertising units in 21 business-centric airports around the world. That media was so unique in its ability to reach older and richer audiences that normally sky-high placement fees were dramatically lower. Our key challenge was agreeing on creative that served both the movie and my brand / product.
Consider Being Evil
Range Rovers make regular appearances in action movies. I suspect that the company consciously signs off on “bad guys” using their SUVs… as long those bad guys are stylish and rich.
If your brand isn’t limited to white hats saving the world, then placement opportunities are greatly expanded (and costs drop).
Rethink the Value from a B2B Perspective
Traditional product placement is all about making a brand/product “cool” through positive association with an appealing movie character.
In contrast, a big part of the value for us was not about a product appearing in the movie. Our prospective buyers weren’t going to make a $5M commitment because the Avengers used our data center hardware.
Instead, we were able to host pre-opening events around the world that allowed our best customers — and their children — to see the latest Iron Man movie before anyone else. Those are emotional experiences that are impossible to quantify and equally impossible to ignore. And those emotional experiences are clearly linked to our brand.
As a bonus, tens of thousands of our employees worldwide got the same unique experience (though I won’t tell you how many spoiled techies complained that their totally free early premier movie didn’t include free popcorn and a soda).
Out of the Box… Negative Product Placement
One set decorator was desperately searching for banks of data center hardware for their villain’s lair. While we provided hardware for the good guys, our execs didn’t want to be evil.
So, using scrap materials we built ugly servers by an imaginary hardware company named, “IBS” (it was purely coincidental that IBM was a key competitor at the time). At the last moment we changed it to “iBS” with a dinosaur silhouette replacing the dot of the i.
To my great disappointment, the final movie footage didn’t give enough prominence for them to be recognized for what they were. But I still think this negative placement approach could work for an edgy brand.
Know When to Cut Your Losses
On paper, the Jack Ryan reboot starring Chris Pine (fresh from Star Trek) looked like a winner. The script included a scene where Jack guided CIA analysts in the search for a terrorist.
We pitched putting this on steroids with a big-screen interface that would dynamically visualize links between diverse information sources including social media, police databases, cell phone records, bank transactions and more. The production team took the idea, ran with it, and delivered the visualization below:
Unfortunately, just before the movie was scheduled to premier, Julian Assange and Wikileaks brought privacy questions to the headlines. My C-level bosses huddled and decided that any positive brand benefits were likely to be outweighed by PR blowback. Reluctantly, I paid to have all branding scrubbed from the completed film. The right decision… but painful.
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