The New E-Marketing Frontier

Today’s guest blogger is Robbin Goodman, Executive Vice President and Partner, Makovsky + Company.

Morgan Spurlock, with his new film, The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, takes product placement to a new level giving POM Wonderful, a popular pomegranate drink, title sponsorship and even inspiring Altoona, PA to change its name for 60 days to make some money off the film’s premiere.

Spurlock’s sarcasm aside, product placement has thrived simply because it works. A survey of views of a recent Hollywood movie that featured branded products found 60% of viewers responded positively to the marketing technique, while 58% felt that the appearance of a certain product onscreen makes it more desirable.

Recognizing an opportunity, the e-book industry seems to be following suit with the upcoming publication of "Harry Hits the Road: Adventures in Love, Labor, and Modern Manhood," by Harry Hurt III. According to a Wall Street Journal account, Mr. Hurt orchestrated a variety of commercial arrangements to finance and market his book, such as getting Coleman to provide a sleeping bag, tent and nonelectric coffeemaker, as well as $2,500 in exchange for display ads and inclusion in the text of the book. The new book is filled with such sponsors.

With the growth of digital book sales taking off, particularly in the U.S., more than doubling to 7% of book sales in 2010 and projected to grow share to 22% by 2015 by PWC, such arrangements could be the next mobile marketing frontier. In fact, the publication of this book coincides with a new release of the Kindle “with Special Offers,” which is less expensive than the regular Kindle but displays ads and sponsored screen savers. (Disclosure: I got a “regular” Kindle for my birthday and I love it.)

But Nicholas Carr, whose recent Pulitzer-nominated book “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains” documents how the Internet age is changing our ability to process and remember the information we read, will likely not be a fan. I personally believe that putting display ads and links in e-books will be disruptive to the book-reading experience, even though it may be a boon to the publishing industry and the companies who buy the space.