I found background information about product placement for cigarettes, alcohol, and food in the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents, and the Media through Gale Virtual Reference Library.

I looked at both the Advertising and the Advertisements Research Guides from the broad category Communications and looked at the Websites tab on the Advertisements guide. Since you are allowed to use websites for this assignment, it is an advantage to begin with reputable sites recommended by a library research guide. I chose to follow the link to AdAge website.

I found some really good articles by searching their site for the term “product placement,” including the article “Twitter Landing More TV Roles Than Most of Product Placement’s Top Practitioners.” This was an easy way to find a good example of the concept.

I used the Advertising research guide to find links to recommended databases and, using the Communications and Mass Media database found a 2011 article titled “Product Placement in Movies and on Broadway” which provided additional examples of the concept. One of the subject terms assigned to this article was “product placement in mass media.”

I used this subject term to do a search in The CAT . . .

and discovered several useful books, such as Branded Entertainment: Product Placement & Brand Strategy in the Entertainment Business and Handbook of Product Placement in the Mass Media: New Strategies in Marketing Theory, Practice, Trends, and Ethics.

Then, I used the Image Databases research guide to find links to sources for images. Under the “News Images” tab, I followed the link to the Newspaper Photos (AP) database, which contains hundreds of thousands of news photos provided by the Associated Press. Information about the photos, and how to credit them, is contained with each image. I found a publicity photo from the 2011 film “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” a documentary examining the world of product placement, with a unique twist – the film was paid for entirely through product placement and marketing deals. This movie is available through Penn State Libraries.