‘Normally’, when it comes to the collaboration between products and anime, most of the people would have an image that the famous anime characters is holding the products in front of the camera and introducing the benefits of the products, or as the mascot is printed on the product packages with some special localized designs. Yet, this kind of promotion method has already become a kind of too much and customers are sometimes quite saturated with this kind of hard-selling promotion.
So how do the sellers promote their products with the help of anime? The answer is product placement.
Product placement, also known as embedded marketing, is a marketing technique that putting the products in some scene of the anime/film/drama, so that the products can reach to a mass audience.
By this method, the products would be appearing in everyone’s eye in a more ‘natural way’ and would have inadvertently influence towards customers.
The above one the one of the scenes from the big hit Japanese anime ‘Your Name.’. Although it does not directly show the brand name or logo, the close up of the water-drinking scene clearly show the water product by Suntory.
Some product placements are more directly shown, showing the brand name and logo of the product. For example, 2018 anime ‘A Place Further than the Universe’ had a scene as below more than 3 seconds.
This time, the drinks are clearly shown and audience can clearly see which brand is in the vending machine.
Of course, besides the Japanese anime, animations from other countries also applying product placement in the film.
The above is one of the movie posters of the recent animated film ‘Ralph Breaks the Internet’, which is an excellent example of product placement in animation. In this particular poster, it is not difficult to find out the logos of different giant companies, including Google, Yahoo, ebay, Youtube, Rakuten, Line, etc. And of course, Disney, the producer. After watching the film, audience would have a strong memory about the brands, so that when they choose to buy products/services, the brand would come up to mind.
According to the article by Media Life Magazine, the market of product placement in USA attained 6 billion USD and almost doubled in 2019 to 11.4 billion USD. The growth rate is so high that it would further grow in the near future, penetrating to different kinds of animations in many countries.
References
charabizasia.com 