Belstaff Converts with Product Placement

One thing marketers often ask me is, does product placement convert to sales? I mean, how can you prove that product placement actually works? Well, I'm here to tell you it does and will do more than its fair share of retail sales in the future. Just ask Belstaff.

Stockists of Belstaff say sales for the brand will continue to turnover long after the tills fall silent following this month's annual Dubai Shopping Festival.

As any globetrotter will tell you, no stopover in Dubai is complete without a visit to Boutique 1, which sells Belstaff clothing exclusively in the region, most recently launching the Trialmaster Legend jacket in the city, the same jacket Will Smith wore in his latest movie, I Am Legend. The jacket has proved to be tremendously popular.

So popular in fact, Belstaff sold 15,000 Trialmaster Legend jackets around the world following the film's theatrical release.

Belstaff clothing has been featured in more than 70 movies in the last three years, and no other fashion brand has had such great success in the history of product placement in movies.

Collaborations with movies benefit Belstaff a lot, especially in terms of the image of the brand and not just the sales. Belstaff also provided apparel for Sweeney Todd, which recently recieved a nomination for Best Costume. They even rugged Cate Blanchett in the Dylan-opic I'm Not There.

Belstaff's track record in the movies is first rate, hitting the big time supplying wardrobe for Leonardo Di Caprio and other players in The Aviator, creating 80 jackets in five days. Two of the company’s most popular jackets have come courtesy of Tom Cruise, whose War of the Worlds' Hero jacket sold 25,000 units. Meanwhile, the jacket Cruise’s character Ethan Hunt wore in Mission Impossible III, the M Blouson, sold 20,000 units.

Numbers like these are only going to get better for product placement. Why? Why do you think Yahoo! acquired Maven Networks last week for $160m? Because Maven, amongst other technologies possesses the killer hypervideo "clickable" app. Why is Microsoft testing and unveiling it's dynamic product placement technology? Because it knows that the value of online video will eventually rival search. That's why it wants Yahoo! Why is Google further developing it's own In-Video Ad technology. T-commerce, which we'll talk about later is another application being lab tested. The reason is because nearly all future screen based advertising will be found in content!

It's why we called ourselves InShot.

If you are a brand owner not currently partnering with content or creating your own branded content, be prepared to do so and do it quickly.

Jiminy Cricket's!