• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, October 17, 2014

Time for another talk with branded entertainment TV professionals. My nine-year old daughter is now booing a segment on NBC’s “The Voice in which Kohl’s dresses up a contestant.  “It’s poo-ey!” she says.

“C’mon, it looks like they are touting one contestant over the others!” adds my wife.

The Kohl product placement appears between a clip of upcoming “Voice” programming content and a regular Kohl’s commercial.

Other product placements on “The Voice” includes contestants being chauffeured in Nissan automobiles. Fewer groans result from that.

Research continues to shows that viewers mostly just shrug their shoulders over branded entertainment: It’s something they put up with to get the “entertainment” they want.

Yet, if that content comes predictably around a regular commercial pod, you can bet that many nimble viewers are becoming more apt with their fast-forwarding technology.

Then again, viewers who watch shows like “The Voice” on video-on-demand services know that the fast-forwarding function is disabled, so that all kinds of advertising messaging are available for their perusal (unless they use the “mute” key).

But some viewers may work differently.

Building on research that the first position of a commercial pod -- the “A” position -- yield greater audience than others, a new study says that the first position yields even greater audience when preceded by product placement from the same brand.  

The synergy of these two activities, according to the research, can reduce audience decline by more than 10%.

Still, there is an audience decline. So the study seems to suggest that product placement creates slightly more favorable results in such usual marketing metrics as recall and engagement.

But the study also says thatproduct placement for a particular brand -- not connected in any way to the commercials that follow -- can actually increase audience loss of all messaging.

More poo-ey.