• by October 11, 2005

TO BE CANDID, THEY ALREADY THINK IT'S BRANDED -- Well-intentioned magazine editors who've been struggling to keep product placement deals from sullying the perceived objectivity of their editorial content appear to be fighting in vain. Their cause is already lost say the branded content pulse-takers at Starcom USA. More than two-thirds (65 percent) of magazine readers surveyed by the media shop say they already believe advertisers pay to have their products featured in stories. What amazes us about the finding isn't the share of readers who assume product placement is the norm, it's that magazine readers are thinking about product placement at all. What kind of cynical media world have we created where the readers of editorial content believe brands hold that kind of sway over what they read? Well, if you want to find out precisely what kind of world that is, you'll sign up to attend MediaPost's soon-to-be-scheduled Branded Content In Print Advertising Forum, featuring a lineup of really great sponsors such as Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith and, of course, the Magazine Publishers of America, but definitely not the American Society of Magazine Editors.

For now, you'll have to content yourselves with the branded magazine insights of Starcom's research team, which demonstrate once again how perceptions can far exceed business realities. We don't know precisely how many advertisers actually pay to have their products featured in stories, but the anecdotal evidence suggests it is relatively little, at least so far.

PQ Media estimates the value of product placements in magazines will reach about $160 million in 2005. While that may seem like an awful lot, it's the equivalent of only 1 percent of the $16 billion advertisers spend on magazine advertising. And as far as PQ can discern, only about 9 percent of those magazine product placement deals will actually involve a cash payment. Most are either barter arrangements or simply happy coincidences. In other words, paid product placement deals are less than 0.001 percent of the magazine advertising business.

No, the stats don't reveal why magazine readers are so cynical. For that, we suspect you'd have to look beyond the numbers and deep into the hard of an American consumer psyche that must contend with thousands of unsolicited brand mentions each day, and virtually everywhere it gazes. People are simply growing inured. And why not? Product placement has become so ubiquitous on television that in many cases brands are as much the stars of the shows, as the starts of the shows themselves.

Just consider how far we've come since just a couple of decades ago, when NBC refused to air Jello pudding commercials featuring spokesman Bill Cosby on "The Cosby Show," because it violated its standards and practices. Today, it would be considered a best practice to actually have Bill Cosby consuming Jello pudding in character on "The Cosby Show."

So if magazines are suffering from a branded content image problem, it's probably not because of anything magazine editors are doing - at least not yet. It has more to do with the fact that the average consumer probably assumes advertisers can place their products in magazine stories simply because they can place them just about anywhere else.