To the point: Losses

Television is one of those things. Regardless of whether you like to watch a lot or only occasionally, the disappointment is always the same: Most of the time, there's only crap on, and when something good comes on, the commercial breaks tear apart any narrative thread and thus the pleasure of watching. The icing on the cake are annoying product placements. Anyone who really likes to watch movies should therefore switch to pay TV, rely on ZDFneo - or turn off the box altogether and go to the movies again.

But wait. Experts at the Wisconsin School of Business have now discovered that product placement and commercial breaks are not quite as useless as they may seem to viewers: product placements during a film reduce the number of people who switch over or switch off during the commercial break. According to the authors of the study, the reduction depends on the type of product and the timing of the product placement in relation to the subsequent advertising. Specifically, if the product placement and the actual advertising come from the same brand, five percent fewer viewers switch off than if different brands are advertised. The greatest synergy between product placement and advertising occurs when the placement and the advertising tout the same brand but different product categories. With this combination, the loss of viewers can be reduced by almost eleven percent.

The study does not provide any information about why this is the case. It's likely that TV viewers who don't switch off or on don't even notice that a commercial break is running. Because if it's always about the same brand, there's a kind of thread that holds the whole thing together. It's true that you're no longer watching a feature film, but an advertising film - but your brain cells don't dance Sirtaki and you still know the next day that the "film" was somehow about Nivea. The study results also fence off two playgrounds for advertisers: one is more targeted product placements, the other new ways to increase advertising reach. But: Even a reduced loss remains a loss.

A great loss and our main topic in the past three weeks was the unexpected death of our editor-in-chief Pierre C. Meier. Pierre and I were able to produce just five issues of Werbewoche together. Far too few. The worst and probably best thing in such situations is that things have to go on. Not somehow, but well. There are big footprints that PCM has left behind. To avoid sinking into them, we are taking new paths - but the direction will remain the same: to provide competent, crisp and critical information about our industry.

Anne-Friederike Heinrich, Editor in Chief

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