Ted Lasso has become, possibly, the great success of Apple TV +. It is true that The Morning Show was his first flagship series, that it sneaked into the television awards of its year and that it achieved a wide echo in the media thanks to its cast of great stars.
However, Ted Lasso has worked almost in a viral way, not to mention it. Now, it usually appears on all the feel-good series lists of the American media, as an example of positive and good-roll content, and from there it has jumped to the lists of the European media, who also wonder why Ted Lasso works.
The series is nominated for a few Emmys. The funny thing about all this is that Ted Lasso is, in reality, the serial conversion of what at first was an advertising campaign on an American television to make it known that he had the rights to broadcast European championships. The origins of the feel-good and buenrrollista series are, pure and simple, marketing.
The interesting thing, when it comes to seeing what its streaming adventure reports to Apple as a giant, is to look at what happens on the screens. Ted Lasso is the most prominent vehicle for Apple’s product placement strategy in its series. When a couple of years ago Apple launched Apple TV +, for analysts and voices in the content market the issue raised more questions than enthusiasm.
Apple came on the market with a very limited catalog, because it did not license content and only feeds its VoD service with its own content (which makes its content offer very limited). In addition, he was spending huge amounts of money recruiting big stars and prominent names to head his cast.
What did Apple hope to achieve with all this? What was the end goal? Competing with the greats of the VoD seemed almost impossible, because their strategies were light years away. The content, it was known then, had to fit in with Apple’s brand image, as the different leaks to the media that were made while it was not appearing on the market had shown. Anyone who has seen an Apple TV + series will also know that technological devices other than those of the company do not appear on the screen.
In the fictional world of his series, everyone is a user of Cupertino products. And there may be the key: the Apple TV + series are, thanks to their first-rate product placement strategy, almost like a very expensive and stylish piece of content marketing. Apple Products on The Morning Show The presence of Apple products is remarkable, as an investigation by The Wall Street Journal has shown . One of your reporters has sat in front of the screen, with many hours of content ahead, and has analyzed how many product appearances are served.
In 74 episodes of Apple TV + series, there have been 704 product placement actions. You’ve seen 300 iPhones, 120 MacBooks, and 40 pairs of AirPods. The endearing Ted Lasso, the queen of the listicles series of recent months, is his best action. The amount of products shown in some chapters means that the average is 1.24 products per minute of viewing.
Of course, Apple had not been oblivious to product placement until now. Their products have been sneaking into series of all kinds, even forming part of the plot itself. One of the best product positioning actions – and one that is always mentioned when talking about success stories – was an episode of Modern Family : the entire plot of the chapter focused on the desire of one of the characters to get a hold of a iPad. In the Apple TV + series, returning to the conclusions of the Journal , the difference is that it controls everything that happens. This makes their products fit into all product placement formats and do so in the most efficient way possible.
The three types of product placement
The specialists differentiate three types of product placement that can be done in series and movies. They all appear on Apple TV +. There is the visual, which is more effective when the product is positioned in the very center of the image. Apple products tend to do so and even when they start on the sides they usually end up moving to the center.
In this frame of Cycles, the computer is placed in the center of the image Then there’s the audio one, which can be very subtle but just as effective. It does not necessarily have to be someone talking about the brand and its products – which is also very valuable – but it can be a sound that we quickly connect with the brand, like the warning tone of a chat.
And finally there is the product placement by connection with the content argument. It is when the product is put into the plot and that, obviously, is very effective. In Ted Lasso , they explain from the Journal , the iPhone is almost one more protagonist in a chapter on the divorce of a character.
good’s and bad’s
Finally, the product placement also takes into account the nuances. The good use of your products is not the same as the bad one. With good characters, a kind of transmission of emotions takes place: you end up feeling the same sympathy for the product as for the character in question.
With the bad guys, that doesn’t happen That’s why Apple doesn’t allow villains to use its products in someone else’s productions. In their own, they don’t. As their series do not include products from other technology brands, what they do is show them on screen with unmarked versions of their products. Out with logos and out with all brand elements.