• by Paul Gough , November 7, 2002

What’s the value of the Junior Mints being featured in that old Seinfeld episode? How much would it be worth to Reece’s Pieces if E.T. was new today? New York-based iTVX is trying to answer those questions and more with a new system that purports to measure the performance of product placements.

iTVX founder Frank Zazza, whose product placement work in television and films stretches back 22 years, says it’s a field that sorely needs industry standards because product placements have no objective value today. “We know what it’s costing in commercials, but what about what you’re getting for your value [in product placement]?”

Zazza says that for a long time, “it was all subjective,” as in “this product placement should be worth this,” and “there never was a make-good dollar figure.”

It’s taken Zazza and his company a year and a half to come up with a formula that measures product placement value and tries to take it out of the realm of subjectivity. The company’s website offers a system that can measure each product placement based on various statistics, a valuation method and compressed video of the product placements where the value adds as the placement progresses.

Zazza says the valuation is based on what’s already used in the media industry. It includes rating and viewership data, the cost per second of a commercial, the level of product placement displayed and factors for impact and watched programs. CPMs factor heavily.

One aspect of the system - the watched program factor - comes from the idea that viewers watch an actual program at least twice as much as they watch a commercial.

“In the show itself, we can evaluate based on the cost of the commercial second the value of the placement times,” he says.

In a recent demonstration, placements were measured in several brief segments from popular programs. It measured and quantified placements where the product was shown in the background, shown in close-up, talked about or held by a character in the program.

“This gives advertisers and networks a range,” Zazza says. “Before this, it had never been standardized. It’s always been subjective.”

The system is available on a client basis through the iTVX website. Other products, such as a database-driven website that will offer trivia games to the general public, are in the works.