Brian Steinberg of Variety explored what various networks will be doing this fall to combat viewers using DVRs to fast forward through traditional commercials. His article, titled “The Death of the Commercial Break: Why Marketers Need to Get More Creative Than Ever”, features an interesting tidbit about ESPN’s plans.
ESPN has an offer that is akin to real-time product placement. Producers at the sports-media outlet have their hands on constantly changing brews of statistics about players and teams, notes Ed Erhardt, ESPN’s president of global sales and marketing, “and we can literally tweak those in real time as we find out what’s going on and use them with ad messages from someone who is buying a college football game.”
Steinberg notes that traditional product placement usually requires weeks of planning and previous knowledge of plot lines and blocking. ESPN doesn’t have the same luxury for live sports, so targeting ads featuring prominent athletes for some kind of enhanced content makes sense. The inability to know the outcome ahead of time also makes ad placement on in-game graphics the most valuable “product placement” ESPN can offer.
Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing has another unique idea that could benefit ESPN.
A lot of the ads during sports events involve athletes, which makes some sense. The whole idea of athlete endorsements is that they’re perceived to have value in promoting a brand to fans, and showcasing that connection during a game is logical. But it’s not necessarily great when those ads come on when the particular athlete (or to a lesser extent, their team) is struggling; if, say, an Aaron Rodgers State Farm ad comes on in a game where he’s thrown several interceptions, that’s presumably not as effective an endorsement, and it’s certainly going to lead to a lot of jokes. If a brand takes a stance that all conversation about an ad is good conversation, maybe that’s okay, but for obvious reasons, brands want to be associated with successful athletes. So what if this kind of “tweak in real time” was about choosing which commercial to show based on how the game’s going? (And if it’s too expensive to shoot multiple commercials with athletes, maybe have a generic one without an athlete that can be subbed in if your athlete spokeperson is performing poorly.)
Advertisers have done this in the past for big events like the Super Bowl or other championships. It would be interesting to see what concessions both advertisers and the networks covering live events would have to make both financially and in terms of content to make that kind of advertising on a more regular basis feasible.
