Product placements are all around you, even if you don’t notice them. While many people subscribe to premium streaming services in order to avoid ads, product placements are built into lots of movies and TV shows, from Emily on Emily in Paris wearing Zeus + Dione to The Home Edit using products from The Container Store.

Placements can also be found in music videos and lyrics, not to mention influencer marketing. There’s even talk of superimposing placements onto existing media, like classic movies. In short, this $23 billion business is only getting bigger.

This must be the place

Many product placements start with an agency that navigates the deal. Erin Schmidt works as the chief product placement officer at one of those agencies, BEN. She told Marketing Brew that deals are a two-way street: Brands seek an outlet to place their product, and production teams (or influencers) seek brands to help boost their budgets.

• “Anytime [a show is] greenlit, that comes to us,” she explained. “Then for the actual brand moments, we respond and have those conversations with a creator to find the right moments [for integration],” Schmidt said.

Sarah Schrode, head of entertainment and influencer marketing for General Motors, said the car manufacturer has been working with BEN for almost 40 years, placing cars from all four of its car brands: Chevy, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac.

• One placement that viewers might remember is the Buick Enclave that Reese Witherspoon’s character drives in Big Little Lies. Schrode said the placement led to a 70% increase in brand opinion and a 90% increase in purchase consideration for Buick, according to internal data.
• “Those are huge shifts,” Schrode told us. “And we liken that to being aligned with someone like Reese, with her character, and with HBO—that high-level premium content. That’s been really important for us.”

Right fit

Schrode said GM has also worked with BEN to help shape its brand image, like with Netflix’s Queer Eye, in which the Fab Five can be seen driving GMC vehicles like the Yukon and Sierra. “[GMC was] really looking for a way to humanize the brand, you know, create an emotional tie with consumers,” she said. “And what better way to do that than on Queer Eye, which has such an amazing storyline?”

• Sometimes the inverse is true, and brands may want absolutely nothing to do with a storyline or character. According to Schmidt, part of BEN’s job is to ensure brand safety measures are in place. For GM, that means making sure a character isn’t drinking and driving one of its cars or skipping the seatbelt, for instance.

Often, Schmidt said, brands want product placements to reflect their ideal customer or brand image. “Context is actually the biggest piece here,” she said. “How do you want your brand represented on screen?”

Looking ahead: Schrode said GM wants to increase placements of its electric and self-driving vehicles as consumer behavior shifts. “We really want to use entertainment content to help with that, start normalizing it, start showing people driving EVs and start showing people charging their vehicles instead of going to the gas station,” she explained.

But does product placement actually work? And are brands required to disclose their placements? Read the full story here.—KH

ICYMI, we live-tweeted the Super Bowl from Marketing Brew’s Twitter account on Sunday night. But if you did, in fact, miss it, we have good news: We’re keeping the fun going today with our very first (!) Marketing Brew Twitter chat.

• To join, head on over to @MarketingBrew on Twitter at 3pm ET.
• We’ll be tweeting discussion prompts and questions for our community using the hashtag #MarketingBrewChat. Respond with the same hashtag to join the chat.
• Today’s topic is Super Bowl reflections, so come prepared to share what you liked (and didn’t like) about this year’s ads, common threads, themes you noticed, and any other takes.

And for those who weren’t able to follow along the other night, here are some of our favorite tweets from Sunday:

A definitive list of who scanned that QR code and who didn’t

Some thoughts on whether Zendaya is the ultimate Super Bowl ad celeb

Even more thoughtful thoughts on Google’s Lizzo ad

The two types of people in the world

See you on Twitter.—PB

Each Tuesday, we’re spotlighting Marketing Brew’s readers in our new Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Matei Psatta is co-founder and CMO of TPS Engage, a startup that helps companies advertise on digital billboards.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? Right now, I help people get on digital billboards for a fraction of what they think it’ll cost. In a broader sense, any marketer’s job is to make you like one product more than the other, all while making you think it was entirely your decision.

Favorite project you’ve worked on? In terms of excitement, definitely our GME GO BRRR billboard, which is now the No. 1 most upvoted Reddit post in history. Before doing what I do now, however, I worked on a campaign for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one meant to provide access to information in rural areas of Eastern Europe. The fact that I could directly see the impact our campaign had on people’s lives stuck with me.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile? I’m an avid gamer and a contact sports enthusiast, so at some point in my life, I want to work on a campaign or product for these two industries. (Funny enough, I don’t like sports [video] games, so it’ll probably be two different campaigns.)

What marketing trend are you least optimistic about? I’m least optimistic about metaverse marketing. Not the metaverse in itself, just to be clear, but if we as marketers think people are trying to create a virtual reality that’s better than our current one and advertising is a part of that world, then we’re just getting high on our own supply. I’m paraphrasing, but one of my favorite sayings about advertising/marketing is “First of all, nobody wants to see your ad.”

Your favorite ad campaign? Close competition between Oreo’s Daily Twist and Guinness’s “Good Things Come to Those Who Wait.”

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Back to the future: Google shared some steps marketers can take to future-proof their programmatic strategies as privacy rules change.

Super brands: Twitter broke down which brands drove the most conversation during the Super Bowl.

Secret crush: Instagram has added a new feature that allows users to privately like other users’ Stories without sending a direct message, which could help boost engagement.

Is this ad gonna work? Before they decided to run with us, ThoughtLeaders crunched the numbers to see if this ad would actually deliver on their campaign goals. You can do the same—whether you’re running in newsletters, podcasts, or YouTube integrations. Download ThoughtLeaders’s free campaign planners to see how.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Inside Kendra Scott’s Bachelor Live sponsorship
• Many Americans are still sweet on Valentine’s Day
• Results are in: Marketing Brew’s Super Bowl quiz

Cryptocurrency ads dominated Sunday night’s Super Bowl broadcast, but the technology already made a big appearance in professional sports when Crypto.com bought the naming rights to the arena formerly known as the Staples Center in Los Angeles last year. How much did it cost the company to secure the naming rights?

1. $500 million
2. $1.1 billion
3. $700 million
4. $950 million