Did other Operation Gadget readers see the first episode of the third season of The Apprentice last night on NBC? The goal in the first episode was to promote one of six new hamburgers that Burger King has announced and sell it at one of the Burger King franchises in Manhattan. The winning team marketed the Western Angus Steak Burger.
If you go to the Burger King website today, you’ll see that the company has launched a new on-line promotion, offering customers an opportunity to build “an even better burger” than the one that the apprentices promoted.
I suggest that this is one of the best examples of the kind of product promotion that will succeed in the Digital Video Recorder era.
My wife and I watched a 90 minute program on NBC, at least 40 minutes of which could be considered an advertisement for Burger King. The show got us talking about which burger we would choose to market, whether the marketing approaches used by the teams were effective, and so on.
I don’t normally eat at Burger King, but I’ll probably stop in sometime in the next week or two and get one of these Western Angus Steak Burgers to see how it tastes.
A couple of days ago, The Los Angeles Times published another article about the threat that DVRs pose to the current television advertising model. The title of the article, Looking for New Ways to Make Viewers Pay, implies that the editor of the newspaper doesn’t get TiVo or the other DVR products.
I say this because the “younger, more affluent and technology-savvy” users of DVRs don’t respond to much of the advertising pushed at us on television today. On the other hand, many of us don’t object to the appearance of some product or brand information in a television program or another sort of story, if the story itself is compelling.
The Apprentice Season 2 was all about product placement. From the perspective of Kathleen and me, some of the episodes worked and some didn’t. I think more of the episodes would have been entertaining, and successful promotions of the brands involved, if the cast had better chemistry and was more imaginative or entrepreneurial.
The new Apprentice episode was a good start. The cast seemed to work together more harmoniously, and on that show it’s particularly important. On the basis of how brand promotions on The Apprentice work, I can see that this technique can be successful. The previous season indicates, however, that this product placement technique is not 100-percent successful and is not entirely dependent upon the strength of the brand or any related product. [ via Engadget , registration required to read The Los Angeles Times article ]