Placement advertising is an underappreciated science these days. We’ve known about it for years, and in the modern era, even celebrated our favorite celebrities securing the “bag” with a product we like being embedded into their material.

This week, we had two far and away winners with placement advertising. The Street Fighter video game series and Subway.

Street Fighter had an epic Saturday Night Live. We had WWE Superstar and streamer, Zelina Vega, enter the Royal Rumble dressed as one of their characters, as announcers gave the Street Fighting game a healthy promo in the middle of one of the most watched matches of the year…

Triple H, Michael Cole, and Zelina after nailing her #RoyalRumble entrance. 💰💰💰 pic.twitter.com/bu0kR9jDfE

— The Frank Torres Report (@ftrtoday) January 29, 2023

Then the video game fighter would pop up again on Saturday Night Live with Michael B. Jordan and Bowen Yang doing a voice over for Ryu and Ken in one of the funniest skits of the night.

That’s a lot of eyeballs. Developers should be happy.

And then we had Subway on the second episode of the new NBC winner “Poker Face” (review HERE). Star lead, Natasha Lyonne devours what has to be one of the best looking subs I’ve seen on screen in an episode that largely takes place inside of a Subway restaurant. You couldn’t avoid the brand. It was impossible. And the episode was also a winner, which only helps.

All done on NBC Universal programming.

Both of these placements were so exceptional that you just have to stand back and admire them. Just like the other aspects of the art, it needs to be appreciated. I’ll take the marketing embedded into my show over obnoxious ads any day.

Good work.

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