Towards a better understanding of practitioners’ ideas about product placement: an empirical analysis in the Italian context

Product placement is an increasingly essential technique in marketing communications. The majority of previous contributions, however, focused on investigating the product placement impact on consumers in the various entertainment contents. In this article, we focus on practitioners’ ideas about the practice. Specifically, we carry out a survey in the Italian context by replicating and extending previous seminal studies conducted in the USA. Replication studies are essential for practitioners to be more confident when applying theoretical insights to their ordinary activities. Findings provide some preliminary insights about the product placement industry in Italy, which is less developed and more linked to the film industry than the product placement industry in the USA. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are presented at the end of the article.