The entertainment industry is a big part of our lives, and has been for decades. From TV and radio to cinema and music, we cannot escape it. And, we’re (more than gladly) consuming it on everyday basis. 

Since we are so “addicted” to entertainment, it opens a window to consumer suggestions and entertainment marketing.

💡 Read Creating a Marketing Strategy that Works: Benefits, Steps, Tools

Try to think how many times a day you see a TV commercial. Or, how many commercials you see when you watch YouTube videos. Or, how many product placements have you seen in the last few Netflix or HBO shows you’ve seen lately (if you have even noticed). You get where I’m going with this.

With entertainment, entertainment marketing also became an inevitable part of our daily lives. 

What is Entertainment Marketing?

Besides the usual – TV commercials, entertainment marketing can nowadays be split into two main categories: product placement and celebrity endorsement.

Entertainment marketing essentials: Product placement in TV shows and movies

Product placement in TV shows and movies is one of the core parts of entertainment marketing. It is a great way of raising brand awareness and promoting products.

For example, actors in a movie scene eat a certain type of food brand or wear a certain fashion brand. It is meant as a subtle (“subliminal”) message to, most of the time unconsciously, get you thinking about the brand and purchasing the items you’ve seen in your favorite shows and movies.

If you’ve ever seen the Sopranos (and I hope you have), try to remember all the cans of Coca-Cola always placed somewhere in the house, the Phillips TVs or the Tropicana juice Tony drinks every once in a while before he goes out to… ok, I’m not gonna spoil anything if you haven’t yet watched this masterpiece of a show. But, you get the point. 

Accidental product placement

Sometimes product placement can also happen by accident. For example, this happened in Game of Thrones. One of the actors accidentally left their Starbucks coffee on the table and, as no one noticed it, it made its air time. That consequently resulted in the Internet community making fun of the show’s mistake, so it kind of backfired. If you know nothing (pun intended) about Game of Thrones – it is a fantasy-medieval-times drama, so there is no way a Starbucks cup could go unnoticed.

Entertainment marketing essentials: Celebrity endorsement marketing

Celebrity endorsement marketing is now a well-known way for brands to promote their products.

We’ve all seen commercials in which our favorite actors, sports players, singers, or TV hosts promote fashion products, food products, cars, events, or anything else you can think of. Brands see celebrity endorsement as a great way of showing us that, if our favorite entertainment heroes trust the brand and use their products, so should we. It’s even better if it gets viral through memes. Just remember the famous Kim Kardashian T-Mobile commercial and the memes that followed it. 

Of course, entertainment marketing experts wouldn’t be doing any of this if it didn’t work. As data shows:

  • 60% of moviegoers feel more positive about brands that they recognized in a placement (source)
  • 20% is the increase in brand awareness that can be expected from product placement in a movie (source)
  • Product placement is an increasingly big business in the U.S., raking in some $11.44 billion in 2019 (source
  • 18% of consumers are influenced by YouTube regarding their purchases (source)
  • by 2023, revenues for the global entertainment industry are expected to reach 2.6 trillion dollars

So, the statistics show that entertainment marketing should be on top of your priorities list if you’re a marketing/PR person working in the entertainment industry.

But, how can you get the most out of it?

Hot to Use Social Listening and Media Monitoring for Your Entertainment Marketing Strategy

As we’ve thoroughly explained in our Entertainment marketing ebook, it’s rarely a case that an industry doesn’t benefit from social listening and media monitoring. The same goes for entertainment marketing. 

There are various ways you can take advantage of media monitoring and social listening to improve your entertainment marketing strategy. Social listening and media monitoring tools, such as Determ, can help you in various ways. From competitor analysis to market research, personal branding or analyzing audience reactions to fan engagement, and much more.

Read Social Media’s Impact on the Entertainment Industry

Competitor analysis

You can use media monitoring and social listening tools such as Determ to see how your movie, TV show, radio show, podcast, or band stands compared to your competitors. 

You can start with the share of voice metric which shows the share of exposure between you and your competitor(s). Use these tools to see is it you or your competition who generates a bigger buzz, both among the audience and the press. If you see that you’re lagging behind the competition, it’s a sign that you need to take some action. 

Market research

Media monitoring is also a great way to see if you should start that new project you’ve been thinking about. 

For example, if you’re thinking about doing another season of a TV show, or putting out another album, media monitoring tools can help you get insight into how people might feel about that idea. For instance, if you’ve been tracking your TV show during the promotion period and after its release, you’d have been able to analyze the audience’s reactions to it. 

Personal branding 

Personal brands are extremely important when it comes to the entertainment industry. Their reputation can either boost a project’s image or cause outrage. Thus, it’s important to keep track of the performers’ (and other people you’re publicly working with) online reputation. That way you can also predict and adequately deal with a PR crisis if it should emerge.

By simply tracking a performer’s name in association with a project, you can have real-time insight into people’s online reactions to the pairing online. You can receive weekly or daily updates through Determ’s alerts and digests.

Tracking audience reactions

In the entertainment marketing industry, it is also important to track and understand the reactions of your audience. By tracking keywords through media monitoring tools (for example, a music band’s name, movie name, relevant hashtags, actors, fictional characters, etc.) you get a feed that’s accumulated mentions from all over the Internet.

(Many media monitoring tools can filter out the mentions by source. If you, for example, want to see only Twitter mentions by a particular topic, you can do so.) 

There is no better way than media monitoring to find out if your audience’s response is positive or negative, and what exactly are they saying about your movie, TV show, album, etc.

But, tracking the audience’s reactions to your entertainment projects is not enough. You need to engage and interact with your audience, too. 

Engaging with your audience

Your fans will, most definitely, be happy to engage with you via online conversations, be it by answering a comment, retweeting or replying to a tweet, liking and sharing user-generated content. Social listening tools can even ease the process of finding the content you can engage with. 

In Conclusion

Entertainment marketing has become an important part of our everyday lives. Through methods such as product placement or celebrity endorsement, brands have the possibility to raise their brand awareness and get their message out to millions of people.

That’s why it is important to do it correctly, and to get the most out of it. To make your entertainment marketing strategy the best possible, don’t hesitate to rely on the help of media monitoring and social listening tools, such as Determ.

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