I know when I was doing work for Chantal Cookware back in the late 90’s early 2000’s they had paid for their tea kettles to be on the stove of almost every sitcom kitchen… it is very difficult to quantify that sort of thing. In that case it was very systematic and had a weekly viewing, so perhaps it sunk in when they saw that kettle at the local Williams-Sonoma… but it was a different world then. Viewership is so fragmented now and it is hard to predict what is going to be the next big Netflix show. Once a show blows up the costs get high obviously. You need to catch it early the way Under Armour did with Friday Night Lights. That by the way is one of the best product placements I’ve ever seen.
… I know this stuff is impactful to retail buyers who you can go in and say “you may have seen this product in such and such”.
Smaller brands can do really well with webisodes, even youtube sponsorships. My friends at Autodromo http://www.autodromo.com used to sponsor all of the video content for https://petrolicious.com Great brand alignment. On the flip, Movement watches sponsors a lot of the video content for Donut Media and it feels way too forced. There doesn’t seem to be an alignment between the brands.