ITV1’s ‘paid for’ product placement evaluation methodologies challenged

NMG Product Placement’s ‘The Value Report’ compares ITV’s product placement evaluation methodologies with accepted norms in the USA and UK.

John Barnard, NMG Product Placement’s chairman, said: “The role of ITV/ Repucom’s computerised brand spotting software has been portrayed as an important part of the process. Yet our enquiries in the States failed to identify this technology being used for product placement evaluation.

“Primarily this software is used for high volume logo spotting in events such as Formula 1 where up to 200,000 individual logo appearances may have to be processed each season.”

In the report, NMG carried out a case study on Midsomer Murders – using Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby’s product placed Volvo S80 as the subject. “In the analysed episode there were only 12 individual Volvo S80 appearances,” says Barnard, “and as a number of these did not feature a logo, I suspect the computer may have missed them (Volvo is not a NMG client)”.

“Beyond our questioning of exactly why use this technology at all, lay two further issues. Firstly, who and where are the trained observers whose judgement calls can mark up spot ratecard by 200%.

“Secondly, product placement evaluation, owing to lack of research, calculates orders of magnitudes, not absolutes. Thus benchmarking to similar activities is vital to begin to form an opinion of relative worth. Spot rate card is only one benchmark, free prop supply product placement, programme sponsorship and paid for product placement in film are some others.”

NMG tracks and evaluates 6000 brand appearances a year. “It would be very interesting to run, say ITV’s data from Dolce Gusto/This Morning through our system and see what the comparative results are,” says Barnard, “and then let us run the other benchmarking value models too”.

The full report can be found here.