• Importance of Product Placement
  • Today, it is rare to consume entertainment content without spotting a brand in the content.
  • Product placements permeate the entertainment world: from books to video games, to movies, TV series, and music videos, as well as within social media content.
  • The growth of the practice of product placement has significantly outpaced that of traditional advertising (PQ Media 2018).
• What Product Placement Actually Is?
  • Current definitions of product placement may have limited the scope and directionality of the research questions addressed to date.
  • Most definitions conceptualize that brands capitalize on the entertainment contents cultural references, for instance, through the degree to which a product is linked to a positive or negative character in the story (Russell and Stern 2006; Knoll et al. 2015), its connection to the storyline, and fit/congruence with the context (Gillespie, Muehling, and Kareklas 2018). Yet product placement functions much like celebrity endorsement; as illustrated in the well-known meaning transfer model (McCracken 1986; Bergkvist and Zhou 2016), brands gain (or lose) from the content but also bring their own cultural meaning to it.
• Narrative Transportation
  • While the extant product placement research has understandably focused on effects at the product/brand level, the symbiotic interrelationships between product placements and their entertainment context make it essential to assess how placements affect the entertainment experience.
  • Given that a positive experience of entertainment is a crucial condition for product placement effects, researchers and practitioners alike must know whether the presence of placements affects the viewers enjoyment or the ability of the entertainment context to carry impactful messages.
    • Narrative transportation is a central mediator of the persuasiveness of entertainment content (Green and Brock 2000):
      • "Whenever viewers depart from normal reality to get transported into an imagined world of the story, this mental state of attention, imagery, and feelings makes them more open to attitude change. "
      • Early product placement research focused on the ability of real brands to increase verisimilitude and thus contribute to the transportability of a narrative, which would resemble the real world (Avery and Ferraro 2000).
    • However, if a product placement is incongruous or inconsistent with the storyline or character with which it is associated, its presence may hinder or halt transportation. This mutual relationship between transportation as a driver of placement effects and placement presence as a potential enhancer or distractor of the transportability of a narrative is ripe for further investigation.

• Discussion Questions
  • What is narrative transportation, in your opinion?
  • Based on your experience, how is the entertainment experience (which is narrative transportation) affected by the inclusion of product placement? Please explain.
  • In what ways is the entertainment content (characters, storyline, realism, perceived commercialism) affected by the inclusion of product placements?
  • (Optional) How do audiences respond to multiple placements associated with the same story/character? Does the temporal order of placements within the same story matter in terms of their impact?