J. G. Navarro
Research expert covering advertising and marketing with a focus on South America
Product placement marketing worldwide – statistics & facts
Commercials and advertisements can boost sales, but product placement is, more and more, a brand's best friend. The 2020s are watching an investment boom in embedded marketing. In 2024, global spending on product placement will reach an estimated 33 billion U.S. dollars. For comparison, marketing revenues worldwide amounted to almost 898 billion dollars a year earlier. Therefore, featuring a brand with varying degrees of discretion and seamlessness on a medium to grant it exposure still attracts less than four out of 100 dollars spent on marketing. However, while the industry's overall size increased by around five percent in 2023, product placement's annual growth rates have been consistently double-digit, suggesting a strong rising trend and depicting a segment responsible for pushing global investments in marketing.
Those impressive figures result from product placement's reach in the U.S., which exceeds 50 percent as of 2024. That share is 10 percentage points higher among Gen Xers and baby boomers, age groups that tend to have more purchase power. Over half of U.S. consumers surveyed that year reported not minding when brands engage in product placement, while more than 40 percent preferred it over other forms of ads. If product placement boosts the overall marketing sector, the U.S. continues to harbor viewers and listeners avid for this practice.
Who places the products where
A 2023 study asked marketing agencies about the budget changes they planned worldwide for the following year. On average, they intended to raise spending on TV product placement by 17 percent, exceeding increases for out-of-home (OOH) advertising (16 percent) and TV (six percent). That reflects the relevance of this medium for embedded marketing: Global TV product placement revenues surpassed 20.6 billion dollars in 2023. However, digital media, film, and music ranked as the fastest-growing product placement channels that year, with increase rates equal to or higher than 13 percent. Digital media alone rose above 15 percent.United States: the product placement powerhouse
The United States concentrated more than half of product placement's global revenues in 2023. Other key ad markets, like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Brazil, all held one-digit shares. Perhaps more importantly, U.S. product placement expenditures grew faster than the global average between 2021 and 2023. In the latter year, the value amounted to over 16.5 billion dollars.Those impressive figures result from product placement's reach in the U.S., which exceeds 50 percent as of 2024. That share is 10 percentage points higher among Gen Xers and baby boomers, age groups that tend to have more purchase power. Over half of U.S. consumers surveyed that year reported not minding when brands engage in product placement, while more than 40 percent preferred it over other forms of ads. If product placement boosts the overall marketing sector, the U.S. continues to harbor viewers and listeners avid for this practice.
