3Cinteractive Blog

In every retail store… in every marketing medium… marketers pay a premium to hold the ideal spot.

On the retail shelves at your local Apple store, third-party companies pay top dollar to be at eye-level. On the big-demo iPods plastered across the Apple store walls, artists paid even more to have their album listed on the static iPod screen. And on the box of that lovely music device that will fill the stockings of the rampant content generation… yep… someone paid to be there too.

The plethora of on-pack marketing agreements don’t sit with just the big companies with retail space or pretty boxes designed in California. In fact, the heart of Business 2.0 revolves around target marketing. Catch the eyes and ears of your market and provide them with offers your database knows they want.

It’s no different than the billboards on the highway, or the sponsored Google Ads. Behind all these product placement strategies are studies that show: being in the line of sight of your target market will increase your sales. Of course, these studies were merely supporting the gut-instinct of an innovator years before.

Companies have scrambled to bid on the box of one of the 110 million iPods sold since its release - a box that barely makes it through the first 24 hours of unwrapping. This is all because that lovely album art complete with the artist’s name and current hit single will be in the direct line of sight when that box first enters the recipient’s hands.

Product placement… despite being about the right place at the right time… for a few seconds at best… is a proven science. Imagine having the control to dictate the right place and the right time.

No more analysis for the right street corner… in the right city… at the right time… with the right distributer.  Enter… right here… right now… on a device that no one can ignore: their cell phone.

Could there be a better place than in your consumers pocket… and a better time than right when you want it?

So while some companies are still pushing the same research dollars into the same variable-filled marketing channels, the new-age companies are experiencing viral growth like never before, because there is no better place than everywhere 250 million subscribers are, right when you need them.

The next medium of product placement has arrived… in your future consumers’ pockets.

- Ainsworth