Is Product Placement the Next Multi-Billion Dollar Industry?
http://www.beet.tv/2008/09/is-product-plac.html Angel investor Ron Conway made a bold prediction to the overflowing audience at TechCrunch50 last Monday: product placement will become the next multi-billion dollar industry. Online video creators rejoiced, but Jim Armstrong, Managing Director for Clearstone Venture Partners, is not convinced. One problem with product placement, Armstrong says, is knowing knowing when enough is enough: Product placement that is too blatant makes consumers suspicious and ends up having the same effectiveness of an ad. His larger, overarching concern, however, is that many entrepreneurs don’t have a thorough enough understanding of budgets and buying behaviors in today’s market. “There’s a little bit of an ‘if we build it, they will come’ mentality, and I realize that did happen in keyword search with Google and Overture…[but] there needs to be the keyword buying market like there was in the click world, something for the brand world,” he says. Still, he
