Leading experts present cutting-edge ideas and current research on product placement! The Handbook of Product Placement in the Mass Media: New Strategies in Marketing Theory, Practice, Trends, and Ethics is the first serious book in English to examine the wider contexts and varied texts of product placement, related media marketing strategies, and audience impacts. The contributors are national experts in a variety of mass media specialties-history, law, and ethics (both media ethics and medical ethics); cultural and critical analysis; content analysis and effects; visuality; marketing, advertising, public relations, and promotion; and digital technology and futures. Handbook of Product Placement in the Mass Media is a part of The Haworth Press, Inc. promotion book series edited by Richard Alan Nelson, PhD, APR. This first-of-its-kind book features interviews with leading critics and proponents of product placement (including the Pulitzer Prize-winning media critic of the LA Times and the Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, DC). You’ll also find a lively roundtable of many of the major contributors (in Q&A format), a review of a recent video on product placement, and a helpful resource guide to publications and Web sites that further enhance the value of the book. From the editor: The influence of product placement is perceived as so great that its detractors have sought federal regulation of the practice. This book examines the wider contexts and varied texts of product placement and related mass media marketing strategies. The contributors represent a rich variety of methodological approaches and viewpoints, which should stimulate readers to think about this complex issue in an appropriately multifaceted fashion and to triangulate their own study. The Handbook of Product Placement in the Mass Media: New Strategies in Marketing Theory, Practice, Trends, and Ethics presents careful research, expert opinion, and insiders’ perspectives on: product placement’s historical contextfrom its origins in early radio and television programming to the evolution of the practice and the advent of advertainment and brand promotion via online computer games the evolution of product placement in Hollywoodwith a trend analysis of the 15 top-grossing motion pictures of 1977, 1987, and 1997 the use of product placement to generate additional production revenue for motion pictures brand synergy and building brand identity legal aspects of product placementhow it relates to the First Amendment and to the Supreme Court’s commercial speech doctrine ethical issues related to product placement, product integration, and video insertion . . . plus fascinating case studies focusing on important aspects of product placement: its use in movie and television programs in general, and in the 2000 movie Cast Away in particular its use as a marketing technique for medical products the impact upon brand recognition of adding an audible reference to a visually prominent brand placement the inclusion of brand names in book storylines the impact upon viewers of the use of fake (generic, fictitious) products in realistic films