Want the watch James Bond wears? Here’s why

Does sex sell? Can subliminal advertising really influence our behavior? The results of a major scientific study are revealed in "Buy-ology." In this excerpt, author and marketing expert Martin Lindstrom looks at product placement in TV shows and movies.

This must be the place
Product placement, "American Idol," and Ford’s multimillion-dollar mistake

Remember that commercial you saw on "American Idol" two nights ago? The one where the tractor salesman was scarfing down those fish sticks, and that kind-of-funny cell phone ad with those two quacking ducks ...

Yeah, me neither. As a matter of fact, I don’t even remem­ber what I had for dinner two nights ago. Steak? Lasagna? Fet­tucine Alfredo? A Caesar salad? Maybe I forgot to eat. The point is, I can’t recall — just as I have no recollection of the third man who landed on the moon, or the fourth person who summited Mt. Everest.

By the time we reach the age of sixty-six, most of us will have seen approximately two million television commercials. Time-wise, that’s the equivalent of watching eight hours of ads seven days a week for six years straight. In 1965 a typical consumer had a 34 percent recall of those ads. In 1990, that figure had fallen to 8 percent. A 2007 ACNielsen phone sur­vey of one thousand consumers found that the average per­son could name a mere 2.21 commercials of those they had ever seen, ever, period. Today, if I ask most people what com­panies sponsored their favorite TV shows — say, "Lost" or "House" or "The Office" — their faces go blank. They can’t remember a sin­gle one. I don’t blame them. Goldfish, I read once, have a working memory of approximately seven seconds — so every seven seconds, they start their lives all over again. Reminds me of the way I feel when I watch TV commercials.

A couple of reasons for this jump out at me right away. The first and most obvious is today’s fast-moving, ever-changing, always-on media assault. The Internet with its pop-ups and banner ads, cable TV, twenty-four-hour news stations, newspapers, magazines, catalogs, e-mail, iPods, pod-casts, instant messaging, text-messaging, and computer and video games are all vying for our increasingly finite and worn-out attention spans. As a result, the filtering system in our brains has grown thick and self-protective. We’re less and less able to recall what we saw on TV just this morning, forget about a couple of nights ago.

Another no less important factor behind our amnesia is the pervasive lack of originality on the part of advertisers. Their reasoning is simple: If what we’ve been doing has worked for years, why shouldn’t we just keep on doing it? Which is a little like saying, if I’m a baseball player who’s been striking out reg­ularly for the past decade, why should I bother changing my swing, or altering my stance, or gripping the bat a little differ­ently? A few years ago, I conducted a small experiment — a lit­tle narrower in scope than my brain-scan experiment — on my own. I taped sixty different TV car commercials produced by twenty different automotive companies. Each one had been running on TV for the past two years. Each one had a scene in which the new, shiny, and seemingly  driverless car guns its way around a hairpin turn in the desert, sending up a dramatic little cloud of dust — poof. The thing is, though the make of car might have differed, that scene was exactly the same in every single commercial. Same swerve. Same turn. Same desert. Same dust cloud. Just for fun, I created a montage of these breathtakingly unmemorable moments on a two-minute reel, to see if I could tell which car was a Toyota, a Nissan, a Honda, an Audi, or a Subaru. And indeed, when I watched the tape, turns out I was stumped. I couldn’t tell one car from the other.

It was, and is, a depressingly true-to-life example of what’s going on today in TV commercials. There’s no originality out there — it’s too risky. Uncreative companies are simply imitat­ing other uncreative companies. In the end, everyone’s a loser because we as TV viewers can’t tell one brand from the next. We watch commercial after commercial, but the only thing we’re left with, if they’ve registered in our memories at all, is the image of a shiny, anonymous car and a handful of dust.

On June 11, 2002, a popular British TV show known as "Pop Idol" made the transatlantic crossing to the United States, and in its retitled debut as "American Idol" became one of the most popular and successful shows in American television history virtually overnight. (The story goes that it never would have been aired in the United States if Rupert Murdoch’s daughter, a huge fan of the show, hadn’t persuaded her father to take a chance on it. She knew what she was doing.)

By now, most of us know how the show works. In its first few weeks, the producers and cast of "American Idol" city-hop around the United States, auditioning aspiring singers whose talent levels range from  expert-but-needs-work, to promising, to at times wincingly bad. Over the course of the season, the show’s three judges eliminate all but  twenty-four contestants, until finally the home-viewing audience gets the chance to vote each week, with the contestant with the fewest votes get­ting kicked off. At the end of the season, the last one stand­ing becomes the next American Idol.

But what do aspiring singers, snarky judges, and dreams of fame, glory, and stardom have to do with the next part of our study? Everything. Until now, I’d only suspected that tradi­tional advertising and marketing strategies like commercials and product placement didn’t work — but now it was time to put them to the ultimate test.

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