When James Bond shows off his Omega: does product placement affect its media host?

Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the marketing literature and practice by examining the effect of product placements on the host brand. The declining effectiveness of traditional advertising has prompted increasing interest in strategies for placing products in media programming. Most existing research adopt the perspective of the brands embedded in media products, with limited attention to the impact that product placement has on the media product that serves as a host brand for the embedded brands. The authors investigate this effect in the context of motion pictures and develop a theory-driven conceptual model. Design/methodology/approach – The authors test their hypotheses with two experiments in which randomly assigned participants view one of seven versions of a custom-made, seven-minute short film that differ in their level of placement prominence. Findings – The results from a mediation analysis indicate that, after controlling for audiences’ general attitudes toward the embedded brand, greater placement prominence heightens consumers’ reactance to persuasion attempts and negatively affects their evaluations of the host brand. A post hoc experiment confirms that even very low levels of placement prominence can worsen host brand evaluations. Originality/value – This research is among the first to investigate the effects of product placement from a host brand perspective. It issues a warning to producers of entertainment content: a product placement strategy may generate additional earnings, but it also can lower audiences’ evaluations of the focal entertainment product.