Product placements can drive searches and purchases, research finds

If you’ve ever found yourself Googling “SATC Samantha purple dress where to buy” after binging a few too many episodes of Sex and the City, you’re not alone.

Three-quarters of US consumers said they’ve searched for a product or a brand online after seeing it in a TV show or in a film, according to new research from BenLabs, an agency that specializes in product placement, influencer marketing, and licensing. Nearly 60% of those customers who searched for something said they ended up making a purchase—either of the same product or of a different product from the same brand.

The data, which was collected through a survey of more than 650 US adults in April 2023, underscores some of the ways product placement on TV may drive purchasing decisions, something that is of increasing interest among advertisers as consumers continue to migrate to streaming services, many of them with ad-free tiers.

“Anecdotally, we’ve always known that there is this inherent power of product placement to drive purchase,” said Erin Schmidt, chief product placement officer at BenLabs, which has placed brands like KFC, Cheetos, and Absolut vodka in shows like Stranger Things, Never Have I Ever, and Dead to Me. The survey data, she said, just “confirms what we've always believed to be true.”

Consumers generally feel favorably about product placement, according to the survey results from BenLabs: Just over half of survey respondents said they’d prefer watching a TV show that had product placement in it over watching ads.

And the effects of product placement on purchases can be rapid. Of the one-third of all consumers who said they’d purchased a product or from a brand they saw on TV, more than half said they made those purchases within one day of seeing the product placement, BenLabs found.

Big business: Product placement is only growing bigger as advertisers shift their budgets toward the medium and as media companies invest in new tech to improve outcomes. In 2022, product placement spending in the US exceeded $15 billion, according to PQ Media, and by 2026, advertisers are expected to spend $23.5 billion. Globally, product placement spending is expected to reach almost $41.5 billion by 2026.  The vast majority of that business is on TV, which accounts for three-quarters of all product placement, although some other mediums—like podcasts—are also experimenting with it.

Editor’s note 8/18/2023: This article has been updated with corrected figures supplied by PQ Media projecting US and global product spend.