Product placement, or embedded marketing, is a type of advertising, in which promotional advertisements placed by marketers using real commercial products and services in media, where the presence of a particular brand is the result of an economic exchange. It is also known as product integration, especially when the product becomes integral to the plot. When featuring a product is not part of an economic exchange, it is called a product plug. Fact: date=September 2008 A few countries, notably the United Kingdom, do not permit product placement in domestically produced films.

Product placement appears in plays, film, television series, music videos, video games and books. Product placement occurs with the inclusion of a brand's logo in shot, or a favorable mention or appearance of a product in shot. This is done without disclosure, and under the premise that it is a natural part of the work. Most major movie releases today contain product placements.Solomon. Zaichkowsky, Polegato.Consumer Behaviour Pearson, Toronto. 2005 The most common form is movie and television placements and more recently computer and video games. Recently, websites have experimented with in-site product placement as a revenue model.

Early examples

Product placement became common in the 1980s, but can be traced back to the nineteenth century in publishing. By the time he published the adventure novel, Around the World in Eighty Days the French writer Jules Verne was a world renowned literary giant to the extent transport and shipping companies lobbied to be mentioned in the story as it was published in serial form.Fact: date=September 2008 Product placement is still used in books to some extent, particularly in novels.

Possibly the first film to feature product placement was Wings (released in 1927), the first film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. It contained a plug for Hershey's chocolate.

Another early example in film occurs in the 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life by Frank Capra where a young boy with aspirations to be an explorer displays a prominent copy of National Geographic. Another is in the 1949 film Love Happy, in which Harpo Marx cavorts on a rooftop among various billboards and at one point escapes from the villains on the old Mobil logo, the "Flying Red Horse".

Still another example is the conspicuous display of Studebaker motor vehicles in the television show Mr. Ed, which was sponsored by the Studebaker Corporation from 1961 to 1963.

The earliest example of product placement in a cartoon occurs in the Comedy Central show: Shorties Watchin' Shorties.

In other early media, e.g. radio in the 1930s and 1940s and early television in the 1950s, programs were often underwritten by companies. "Soap operas" are called such because they were initially underwritten by consumer packaged goods companies such as Procter & Gamble or Unilever. Sponsorship still exists today with programs being sponsored by major vendors such as Hallmark. Incorporation of products into the actual plot of a TV show is generally called "brand integration". A recent example is HBO's Sex in the City, where the plot revolved around, among other things, Absolut Vodka, a campaign upon which one of the protagonists was working, and a billboard in Times Square, where a bottle prevented an image of the model from being pornographic. Knight Rider, a TV series featuring a talking Pontiac Trans Am, is another example of brand integration.