Product placement is old: ‘conversation placement’ is the future

PRODUCT placement has been finding its way strategically into our entertainment. We all know it. We’ve all seen it. Product placement had a breakout moment when ET followed the Reese’s Pieces to his new home in 1982. But even then, none of us could have called it becoming a multibillion-dollar industry across film and TV alone. Who would have thought we’d then see Wakandans driving Lexus?

We spend countless hours consuming entertainment, not only for the sake of amusement or enjoyment, but also to become more human. We consume stories of others, by others, to better understand ourselves, to be taken away from our lives so we have more space, to help us relate to those around us and ourselves, and to help us better understand all of this messy humanness that’s going on.

When it comes to strategic product placement, it’s no surprise that brands are willing to spend large parts of their marketing dollars on infiltrating our entertainment with the products they want us to buy. Sometimes it’s tiresome and sometimes it manifests itself naturally but, when it’s done correctly, it can have a huge impact.

Hershey (Reese’s parent company), Lexus and others have made millions — even billions —through this tactic, selling out products and contributing to cultural conversations at the time. Placement is powerful.

So, how about we use the same concept to address important social issues?

Not by only placing products but also placing conversations? We call this ‘conversation placement’.

And this concept might be the vehicle we need to start to chip away at larger societal and systemic issues — precedent has proven that.

Let’s have a look at health and wellness to start.

It’s no news that we have a health problem. Globally. Locally. Systemically. And individually. Research shows that health inequity is one of the greatest threats to humanity in our generation. For context, the infant mortality rate is 2.3x higher for African Americans than for non-Hispanic whites*. African Americans are also 40% more likely to have asthma** and 11.7% more prone to diabetes than non-Hispanic whites.*** Could bringing ‘health’ into our entertainment be the answer to making a dent in finding a solution? What better vehicle to drive awareness, facilitate education and encourage understanding around topics that are real and very much not going away than the same places we go to learn about being more human?

A brand that wants to take on health equity can approach conversation placement in the same way it would with product placement — and arguably make even more of an impact. Instead of placing an adidas Samba in our next favourite movie, we place a teenager with asthma in Euphoria or a migraine sufferer in True Detective. We have seen disparate examples of conversation placement over the years. Like when Law & Order led to an increase in law-school applications or when Monk brought the idea of neurodivergence to television — or even when Dallas Buyers Club took us all into Ron Woodroof’s life. There’s an opportunity to do more. Because there’s a divergence between business purpose and brand purpose, we have been looking at how we respond clearly to those needs — such as making purpose personal and ensuring we bring joy, we delight and we move from fear and distrust to a point of view where we entertain to drive change. Through conversation placement in entertainment, we can talk about real topics with real peo - ple to drive real action. We can diminish the inequities with an approach that will reach more communities through culture, content and inclusion. Conversation placement allows us to move away from the traditional tropes of trying to imitate consumer advertising within regulatory boxes. To put conversation placement into practice, we at Havas are launching Welltainment™, where we bring together wellness with entertainment to close the health-equity gap, even a little. To get the ball rolling, we will work with our clients to take a crack at six health areas with the most inequity: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental health, HIV and paediatric asthma.

I’m not sure where this all leads, but conversation placement feels like the right place to start. And it’s possibly a powerful tool in our arsenal for the future. Coming to a piece of your entertainment soon.