Measuring neurophysiological signals, fixations and self-report data for product placement effectiveness assessment in music videos

Product placement is a marketing technique that, by inserting products into a narrative structure, constitutes a likely effective tool to increase the visibility and notoriety of a brand. For years, the opportunities for product placement in music videos were limited. Recently, there has been a growth of interest for this tool/advertising modality since the digital community allowed the possibility to move videos from television to the Internet. The scope of the present study is to investigate the effectiveness of the product placement in music videos. An electroencephalographic (EEG) index called mental effort (ME) has been analyzed, in addition to the emotional index (EI), calculated by the combination of galvanic skin response (GSR) and heart rate (HR) signals. Self-report responses have also been collected through an online questionnaire and interviews, since one experimental question was to investigate whether viewing a video containing a commercial product could influence the declared recall of the product inserted in it and the spontaneous recall of the video itself. Furthermore, fixations related to the product inserted in videos have been obtained by the eye-tracking technique (ET). Higher values of the ME (p = 0.016) and EI (p = 0.033) have been found for videos with product placement in comparison to videos without it. In addition, results show that the number of fixations affects the recall of the showed products (p < 0.001). These findings highlight that using product placement in famous singers’ music videos is an effective technique for prompting product recall and how it helps to focus the visual attention on them.