Product Integration
Product Integration has been around for a long time now, but it keeps changing. Done right, it is a blend of partnerships between brands and publishers. It provides the brand a way to extend its product into places where people are searching for the very need the product addresses.
With today's sophisticated consumers, the best kinds of product integration tie the product being promoted inextricably with the activity the consumer is performing online.
One example is a Target and Yahoo partnership. Target has a “Print to Store” capability. Users can upload their photos to either Yahoo Photos or Target Photos, edit them online, store them and share them.
Yahoo Photos:
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Target Photos:
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Users can then send the photos to their local Target for printing. They can either have photos delivered or pick them up, which is ideal for the those consumers who don’t want to wait for their photos to be mailed. It’s a brilliant concept that ties in the actual activity that someone is doing -- uploading and printing their photos -- with particular sites that also deliver that capability (Yahoo Photos).
Here, instead of an online pure play, we see a brick and mortar (Target) taking advantage of the benefits of online (Yahoo) in conjunction with its offline assets.
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