The Branded Content Encyclopedia

↑Advergame

An advergame is a videogame that is made for advertising purposes. It can promote the company the whole time (e.g. build your own McDonalds restaurant) or be a more independent game that is simply made and sponsored by the brand. Some also speak of advergames when a videogame contains product placement. However, the difference between an advergame and product placement is that the advergame is solely created for the advertising purpose.

↑Advertising Object

Advertising objects (or simply objects) are the entities that you are going to advertise for (like products or brands) - combined with a specific target audience. Objects also include information about the specific company, the market and (most important) the marketing goals. This information is very important, because the success of advertising mainly depends on the brands goals and specific market environment!

↑Attention

Attention with regards to product placement means the attention of the target audience towards the placement and/or the product/brand. Latest research also showed that attention can occur consciously as well as subconsciously.

↑Attitude

Attitude is usually combined with an additional object like the product placement or brand. The audience can have a specific attitude towards the product placement and another towards the product and brand.

↑Branded Content

Branded content usually refers to content that is made by a specific brand. This can mean that the content is in fact produced and distributed by the brand (e.g. corporate blog) or that a specific product/brand plays the absolute main role in the content. Branded content is also named branded entertainment. However, branded content is broader and includes also non-entertaining content, like newspapers.

↑Branded Entertainment

Branded entertainment is branded content where the content is entertaining. One famous example is the short series "The Hire" by BMW. The difference between branded entertainment and product placement is the fact that branded entertainment is initiated by the brand, whereas with product placement, the brand only participates in the content.

↑Celebrity Marketing

Celebrity marketing refers to the use of a famous person's reach and standing to promote brands and products. The brand usually sets up a contract with the celebrity. The respective person agrees to, for example, wear a specific shirt, drive a specific car or promotes something in public. There are also cases, where this happens without any contractual partnership and payment. It is also often combined with Product Placement or traditional commercials. Imagine a sport star, wearing label XYZ, while also promoting it in a commercial and on TV. Nowadays, many refer to celebrity marketing with social media stars as Influencer Marketing.

↑Congruence

Congruence describes how good some things fit together. Here, it means how good a brand/product fits to a respective content. The construct of congruence can be defined and measured in different ways. We use one of the most advanced system, where it is determined by the dimensions expectancy (I expected that the brand appears in this movie) and relevancy (it makes sense that the brand appears in this movie).

↑Consideration Set

The consideration set describes a set of brands that a person considers to buy in a specific situation. The consideration set is part of the awareness set (sometimes also evoked set) that describes the brand someone remembers and part of the total set that defines all relevant brands. There is a wider discussion about if the consideration set is further reduced to a choice set before the actual purchase. We adapted the most common understanding that the choice set is based on the consideration set and contains the brands that are actually purchased.

↑Embedded Marketing

Embedded marketing maybe is the broadest definition of product placement. It describes marketing activities that are included in other content or events. Therefore, it includes product placement, branded entertainment, branded content, native advertising, advergames as well as parts of sponsoring and even more.

↑Explicit Memory

The explicit memory refers to a conscious memory of past events. It is usually measured by (free) recall tests.

↑Format

A format is usually used with regards to film and TV and describes an overall concept of a program or a show. This can be something like the TV show "Big Brother", but also a sitcom like "Scrubs". At Placedise, a format usually describes the setting, style and details of a specific frame medium.

↑Frame Medium

At Placedise, a frame medium is the content that surrounds the product or brand in a embedded marketing activity. Example: The movie "E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial" would be the frame medium for Hershey's Reese's Pieces.

↑Generic Placement

A generic placement is a specific type of product placement where the placement is about a concept or usually product category. There are usually no logos visible. It is most often used in industries with less competing players, political or ethically difficult areas. Examples would be smoking people to promote cigarettes or fish and vegetables for promoting healthy food.

↑Image Placement

An image placement usually describes a product placement that defines the whole content. A good example is the movie "The Internship" (Google).

↑Implicit Memory

The implicit memory is an automatic, subconscious and unintentional process that handles perceived information. This perception happens before any explicit process. There are many ways to measure implicit memory effects. However, those measurements are much more difficult than simple recall experiments. They are usually based on either physiological observations (e.g. brain scans) or experiments that test some improvement on different tasks. The implicit memory handles by far more information than the explicit memory does.

↑Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is basically Celebrity Marketing with social media stars. It can be mainly found on YouTube or Instagram and is often also basically Product Placement. In the end, influencer marketing can be defined as doing any marketing with social media influencers.

↑Involvement

The construct of involvement describes how relevant something is to the consumer. Concerning product placement, involvement means how relevant the specific product (or the placement itself) is to the specific person. People perceive this relevance usually based on their values, needs and interests.

↑Location Placement

A location placement is a product placement, where the product is a location. This can be a country, a city, but also a specific company, restaurant or university.

↑Mere Exposure

Mere exposure effects describe the phenomenon that people evaluate a specific object better just because they have seen it very often. This is usually due to the repeating perception of the stimulus. There is a long lasting discussion about the reason and origin of this effect. In the end, it can be explained by a combination of priming, processing fluency and conditioning processes.

↑Message Placement

Message placement is very similar to generic product placement. Message placement is about placing a specific message like "live healthy", "do more sports" or "party hard". It is not about products or brands, but about how to act and live.

↑Modality

Concerning product placement, modality describes the physical presentation of the product. It can be further itemized to a visual (screen placement), audio (script placement) or audio-visual (plot placement) presentation.

↑Native Advertising

Native advertising describes ads that are woven into editorial content. It is basically product placement or branded entertainment, but usually only used with online and print content. Some also refer to content marketing as native advertising.

↑PDGA

PDGA stand for the Potential Degree of Goal Achievement. It describes how well or bad a given goal is achieved by defined activities. "Potential" means that it is no actual valid ex ante measurement, but more a forecast or prediction. At Placedise, it is used to determine the advertising effects and impact of a specific product placement activity - since those corresponding goals can never be measured with a 100% certainty, this KPI is always a potential one.

↑PLACE

At Placedise, the advertising opportunity, you want to test, is called a PLACE. A PLACE includes the relevant advertising object as well as the corresponding format integration. Example: The possible product placement of a new automobile model within a spy thriller (including all details of the product presentation) is a PLACE. Each alternative for this placement is another PLACE. Looking at traditional advertisement, one commercial would be one PLACE.

A Sub PLACE splits a given PLACE into more entities. Those Sub PLACEs differ in the way the advertising object is integrated into the content within one PLACE. Example: An integration of a new car in a comedy blockbuster is a PLACE. If the product is placed multiple times within this PLACE, you look at Sub PLACEs.

↑Plot Connection

The plot connection describes how well a product or brand is woven into the surrounding content. This usually means the connection to the story.

↑Priming

"Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences a response to another stimulus" (wikipedia.org).

↑Processing Fluency

Processing fluency describes how easily information can be accessed by a person in his/her mind. The processing fluency usually increases if a person perceived a stimulus multiple times (consciously or subconsciously). It is therefore also somehow connected to mere exposure effects and priming.

↑Product Placement

Product placement describes the integration of a product or a brand into another surrounding content (frame medium). Product placement is a specific type of embedded marketing. At Placedise, we use the term "product placement" sometimes also for similar marketing tactics like branded entertainment or native advertising.

↑Recall

Explicit memory effects are usually measured by recall experiments. In those tests, people will be asked to name all products or brands, he or she has noticed in (for example) a movie. It can be aided (further information, like the product category) or unaided/free. Recall tests are often used to determine the effective reach of a product placement. It is easy to execute, but does not get implicit effects of the advertisement.

↑Recognition

Recognition tests are also used to measure explicit memory effects. Similar to recall test, the test person has to identify the products or brands he or she has seen before. Instead of simply naming them, the person has to pick them out of a given set.