This chapter shines a light for understanding consumer behavior on the way the consumer develops awareness of product placements in the television content, interest in products she noticed, desire to get one of these placed products, and finally intent to take an action to gather information about the product. Public relations, marketing, and sales experts can benefit from product placement if they truly analyze the consumers who are active at the second screen. Thus, brands with recent product placement know-how can successfully manage their reputation and sales related to interest of potential customers at the second screen.
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According to “Turkey Population Health Research” held by Hacettepe University, at least one television set exists in 97.9% of total houses in Turkey, with no significance difference between urban and rural areas, 98.2% and 96.6% respectively. “Turkish Family Structure Research” also shows that 91.9% of Turkish population admit to watch TV every day. Total rating of most watched top ten television channels corresponds to 67% of overall television rating (www.connectedvivaki.com). These results provide confirmatory evidence that television plays an important role in the mass communication since a message can be delivered to vast majority of the population in seconds. Hence, natural environment of the modern people, home is dominated by the television. That is why the power of television in mass communication is accepted by sector professionals.
Total advertisement expenses are increasing each year with a rate of 7-9% in Turkey. Although the share of television advertisement spending in total advertising market seems to decrease slightly to 50.51% (in 2015) from 51,40% (in 2014), television, with a mass existence, presents a great opportunity to brands to advertise themselves. That is why television is still primarily preferred communication and public relations management medium for brands and companies. However, viewers have developed a avoiding manner towards advertisements obviously promoting some exaggerated products. On the other hand, there is another way of television advertising called product placement which increases the brand visibility in a native and not disturbing mood. Combining advertisement with entertainment content so-called native advertising is found less intrusive and more likely to be shared. Moreover the consumer engages with the native content more when compared to an ordinary advertisement because of not realizing that the content is actually a paid advertisement (Wojdynski and Golan, 2016). Therefore brands desiring to maintain an effective television communication need to use alternative native advertisement methods such as product placement.
This paper is based on the improvement necessity in television communication losing its power towards alternative channels such as digital communication. Both advertisers and content owners face with several problems in the current television advertisement industry. Issues that advertisers are struggling with is undesired behavior patterns of viewers such as changing channel or heading towards the second screens during commercial breaks and consuming content illegally without advertisement. Further challenge is the difficulty in calculating return of advertisement investments made for television medium. Although accrued television advertisement investments were around 3 million Turkish liras during last three years in Turkey, 56.4% of the viewers admit to change channel when commercial breaks start. The percentage has increased approximately 16 points in 2013 compared to 2006 data (RTÜK Television Watching Trends Research, 2013).
Challenges that the content owners deal with are avoiding illegal content publication, measuring viewer appreciation and learning more about the people consuming their content. According to the top websites in Turkey list released by alexa.com, 7 out of first 100 websites are websites providing illegal content. There are also sources in internet supplying “.torrent” kind of download files and so illegal content consumption is widely accessible. Due to the nature of digital world, even illegal content providers have more information about their viewers than content creators. The way to identify content consumers passes across digitalization. According to TUIK data, only 24.6% of the total television sets in Turkey can connect to internet, consequently TVs lack of digital tracking opportunity.