SHELTON, CONN. -- — On the fourth floor of an office building in this green Connecticut town, Sarah Martin goes to work every day as a television watcher.
She doesn't mind watching "Ellen" and "Lost." She hates the days she has to sit through "American Chopper."
Unfortunately, she can't fast-forward.
Martin's job is to count when brand names such as Coca-Cola or Cadillac or Yamaha appear in TV shows -- on a soda can, whizzing past in a street scene, flashing on a billboard in the background, anywhere within the camera's range. She works for research firm Nielsen, which provides the information to advertisers who want to keep tabs on where competitors' products are popping up in TV shows.
They are popping up quite a bit these days: Martin said when she started her job a year and a half ago, she'd count an average of 10 brands in a prime-time network show. Now, it's closer to 50. Viewers of the logo-laden "American Chopper" on Discovery Channel might be exposed to brands as many as 1,000 times per show.
"I used to watch TV all the time," she said. "Now I go home and do other things," such as reading books.
Martin is part of a small army of people employed by research firms and advertisers to track product placement, one of the fastest-growing segments of the advertising industry. Advertisers spent $2.9 billion in 2007 to place their products in TV shows and movies, up 33.7% from the year before, according to media research firm PQ Media. This year spending is projected to hit $3.6 billion, not including "barter" arrangements -- in which a company gives away products to be used in shows, rather than paying for them to be placed there.
Firms for a long time have been measuring the frequency of traditional print and broadcast advertising. As a result, advertisers know who is spending what, and where.
But product placement has traditionally been a back-door industry, arranged by prop masters on TV shows and movies rather than by professional agencies. This has made it much more difficult to monitor who is placing products, and how often and where they appear.
Some, such as the Federal Communications Commission, are concerned that it is too difficult to discern when product placements occur. Last month, the FCC said it would consider new rules to better inform viewers when brands appear on shows in exchange for money. Such disclosures currently run during the credits, but the agency plans to examine whether product placement notices should be written in bigger print and displayed for a longer period.
