Marketing isn’t really my thing, but this sounds nefarious in a mad scientist sort of way.
Forget Product Placement; Get Ready For Product Anti-Placement | Techdirt (h/t Slashdot)
Product placement is so ubiquitous, I’ll now be wondering if it’s positive or negative reinforcement.
Maybe Paul (@ppedrazzi) has some thoughts.
Twitter Comment
Negative Product Placement [link to post]
– Posted using Chat Catcher
I tried to think of the most harmless thing. Something I loved from my childhood. Something that could never ever possibly destroy us.
But this is fashion, the associations people will make are context sensitive, where the context is highly variable. People who are slaves to fashion will do the silliest things – backfiring in the techdirt example – and most others will take the opposite opinion, but not do anything about it. Marketing analysis would look for a positive lift from a campaign, but have no metrics for a negative proof. In other words, negative placement is BS.
Besides, people like the anti-hero.
Nice. It’s a good day when you can work a Stay-Puft marshmallow man reference into a comment.
I wouldn’t call Snooki an anti-hero, not that I’ve seen more than a few minutes of Jersey Shore. Even though this example is fashion, it might be at work in other product placements too. We just don’t know bc as you say, it’s difficult (impossible) to track negative attention.
Product placement is so rampant I don’t even notice it much anymore.
The negative attention is easy to track, as so many trending sites show. The problem is tracking a sales loss in a competitor. If any publicity is good publicity, this would be a big goof, and show the negative association doesn’t work. If everyone sends the product, then maybe they all get attention, but it certainly isn’t the effect putatively desired. My inner conspiracy theorist says some marketing dweeb at one of these vendors was getting drunk with one of his competitors, and they dreamt up this viral rumor scheme.
I know when I see negative campaign ads, filtered through my bias, they often have the opposite effect of what the party obviously intended. I see Meg Whitman trumpeting eBay, and I associate her with that Florida book-burning nutcase, who makes money selling furniture on eBay. I see them talking about how Brown said proposition 13 was a bad idea when it was proposed, and I think “yeah, he was right, that is the reason we have budget problems now.” (For those who wouldn’t know, Prop13 was the beginning of the Reagan-era voodoo economics/tax revolt, in the late ’70s)
I don’t expect that trend to last, i.e. tracking lost sales. Big Brother (Apple, Google) will figure out a way and sell it to marketers.
I’m similar in that I tend to dislike being told what to think. Sometimes it spot on, but I need to arrive on my own time 🙂