4 product placement advertising examples that stood out in 2024 - including Doritos

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In this Breakdown, we're looking at ✨ product placement ✨ - but fear not, dear reader! I don’t mean unnecessarily long shots of an Omega on James Bond’s wrist. I mean how marketers literally place their products - on shelves, and in their own ads.

1. Doritos are on fire

This campaign isn’t exactly recent, but new iterations on it keep surfacing on my feed.

Doritos Flamin’ Hot (or the Extra Flamin’ Hot variety) have been a big favourite in the US for a while. And as they’ve spread like a spicy plague to Europe, Doritos have been coming up with tons of cool ways to land them in store.

This one is my favourite. It’s a shop floor shelf that literally crackles with heat. The flames are some kind of water vapour wizardry (or, perhaps, an intern furiously vaping behind the display?), and the whole thing makes a crackling noise like there’s a real fire going on.

All to land the single selling point of these crisps - they’re spicy.

They already have all the packaging codes of spicy things and Doritos. But this in-store activation is literal fuego.

It’s been years since someone first said the words “people shop on auto-pilot”, but if ever there was a brand determined to snap you out of it, Doritos is it. This is such a great POS activation, with the kind of care and creativity that spaces like this really need. Don’t get me wrong, I think the copy (“A rollercoaster of tastes”) doesn’t quite live up to the idea, but who cares about that when the shelf is literally on fire.

2. International Beer Day is a real thing

I can’t believe I didn’t do anything to celebrate it.

But Heineken did.

They launched an ad called “Forgotten Beer” - the spot focuses on the beers that sit there, unfinished, because their drinkers are having such a good time with the people around them.

And I think the placement of the product in this ad is so good. The beer is always centerstage. It’s the only thing really in focus for a full 60 seconds. But what happens around the beer tells the story.

Friends at the pub watching sport, a couple getting it on, people reaching for food off of a table, playing some table football, having a laugh together.

I love the way that as the ad goes on and you recognise various scenes from your own life, you get that kind of wistful melancholy. That time you picked up your forgotten beer and it was warm and it was flat and you were kinda sad but not really because you were busy having a conversation with someone that you’d remember for far longer than you would that beer.

The Breakdown often ends up very alcohol-heavy, doesn’t it?

But this is a really good product focused ad. Ticks all the necessary boxes - show someone actually drink the product, show it off in various consumption moments, be emotional and a bit funny, give the product an actual role to play in the stories you’re showing. But it also has such a lovely product insight at the heart. It’s not as simple as Doritos’ “It’s spicy” message, but the execution of the idea that “it’s not the beer you drink, it’s the people you drink it with” is so so good. Big thumbs up.

Also - anyone else notice how the last beer shown very neatly cuts the Heineken logo on the glass? If anyone at Heineken reads this, please write in and tell me if you’re trying to start your own low-key split the G trend.

3. Bodyform hardly even show the product

And it makes for great product placement.

Bodyform have been putting out awesome work for ages now. AMV keep churning out these banging ads - and they all have that same thread to them. Look at real stories behind periods and menstrual health. No more blue CGI liquid.

That means that in an ad like this, you hardly see the product at all. There are a few moments, like someone’s exasperation with keeping their tampon in, but largely the ad ignores the product. Instead it focuses on the drama that comes with periods, and the frustration of being told, “it’s just a period”.

Look, I don’t want to get into the whole post-purpose conversation. I don’t care. But I think that the way Bodyform and AMV have continued to evolve this platform is really interesting. It’s not really an ad-turned-protest any more. It’s not a rallying cry or a shout of indignation. There’s real humour and craft and storytelling in this. It’s a two-minute drama that is entertaining and very re-watchable, like a trailer for a new Netflix show. Essity’s global brand communications manager for Femcare, Luciana de Azevedo Lara, says that humour has been a new but welcome ingredient for this campaign:

“It opens more doors for people that might be a bit reluctant to talk about taboos to be suddenly open and invited, to join in with the talk and see themselves in it.”

And that’s where the product comes in. By pretty much circumventing showing off the product directly, the product message itself is pretty clear. It’s a tampon (and more) designed by people who understand women’s bodies.

My one gripe is that there seems to be a lingering strategist’s idea in there that doesn’t quite fit. “What do you wish you’d been told about periods before you got your first one” is a great place to start, and presumably led to the idea for the opening scene (that girls get their first period and think they’re dying). But given where the rest of the ad goes, it feels less and less like that “what do you wish you knew” idea is that relevant.

I really am nitpicking. I love the ad for its pure entertainment factor, and love the brand for the way they’ve managed to navigate themselves through varying tides of purpose-washing, and more recently consumer shopping changes.

4. This actually happened years ago

But I still think it’s interesting.

Back in 2022, Aldi changed the way they labelled “female hygiene products” to specifically avoid using those three words. They followed suit from other supermarket chains like Asda who had already rolled out similar updates to their shelf nomenclature.

There are three things going on here that I think are especially interesting:

1. Use normal words
   No one uses the phrase “feminine hygiene products” in their daily life. Tampons, pads, liners - these are the ways people actually refer to the products they buy and use, so using the same words in-store is just better at directing people on where to go. Better signposting, better in-store experience.
2. Normalise words for others
   Hard not to think about this given the Bodyform ad above - but there are plenty of people who prefer not to refer to these products at all. People (mostly men, let’s be real) who for some reason can’t quite stomach the concept, let alone the physical things themselves, of people who menstruate needing specific products for their periods and vaginal health. I don’t think Aldi did this to take a stand, but you don’t really have to if you’re simply willing to call things what they are.
3. Why are some words more normal
   This is more of an intellectual point than a marketing one, but general accepted fact is that Anglo-Saxon-derived words are easier to understand for native English speakers than words imported from, say, Latin or French).
   “Feminine” → Woman.
   “Hygiene” → Health.
   Right, Woman Health Product would make for a truly awful in-store sign, but you see my point. Some words are easier to understand, especially when they mean exactly what you are trying to say. “Feminine Hygiene” → Periods (and yes, some other things as well, though the containers also have more specific labelling too).

For brands, it can be easy to think that if we put Brand Name and Logo in store, that’s the job done. And sometimes, I think it is. But does anyone else have an unnecessarily hard time finding the specific McVitie’s digestives they’re after? Part of me wants the pack to clearly say “Dark Chocolate Digestives”, rather than looking at the milk chocolate variants and trying, from memory, to compare different shades of brown.

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