A story published today in the MediaPost Agency Daily newsletter (and yesterday on the MediaPost website) incorrectly reported that ad agency Kovel Fuller, based in Culver City, CA, had shut its doors.

CEO John Fuller, who was not contacted for the incorrect story, confirmed today that the agency gave up the lease to its physical offices in Culver City effective Aug. 1, but stressed that the agency is operational remotely and serving clients like Yokohama tires and web and mobile design company Owning.com.

Attempts were made to contact the agency through its office number which was disconnected and an email address on the agency website for the original story, which was confirmed by multiple sources, who as it turns out, were wrong.

“We’re still in operation, still serving clients and still paying our employees,” Fuller said, noting that part of the reason the firm gave up the lease to its physical space was to be able to continue to do just that. He noted that the Culver City Office building had recently changed hands and that the firm’s property taxes increased exponentially.

Fuller also stressed that KF’s situation is in “no way, shape or form” like the Palisades Media Group situation which suddenly closed its doors.

And regardless of its future direction, Fuller said the company will “not ever” file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

That said, Fuller has discussed the possibility of retiring and winding down the operation some time after the end of 2022. “Who knows what the future will bring,” he said. “It’s not a certainty.”

He noted that he has kept employees “in the loop” and made a commitment to keep on all employees “at least through the end of the end year.”

But, he noted, “it has not been a great couple of years,” given the pandemic and its impact on the economy.

After its worst recorded decline during the pandemic’s first year in 2020, product placement is back with a vengeance.

Globally, product placement spending surged 12.3% to $22.93 billion in 2021, fueled by double-digit growth in six key media platforms, according to PQ Media’s Global Product Placement Forecast 2022 – 2026. PQ Media has been tracking product placement for 47 years.

In the United States, which accounts for 56% of the global market, product placement also bounced back from an unprecedented decline in 2020, with a 13.2% increase in spending last year, to $12.84 billion. All six media platforms also saw double-digit gains in the U.S., led by digital media (18%), recorded music (15.8%) and television (15.7%).

This year, product placement spending is on pace to grow at an accelerated 14.3%, to $26.2 billion, globally — nearly doubling since 2016.

The report attributes the surge to “greatly expanded” brand integration opportunities across multiple media platforms and channels.

The U.S. is the main driver of the surge. The value of product placements in all U.S. media is projected to jump 15.1%, to $14.77 billion, this year. The increase reflects “the growing number and value of product placements targeting more mobile and diverse younger consumers” via streaming TV, films, digital media and recorded music channels, according to the report.

Television overall still dominates product placement, with 70% of global spending and a value of $16.06 in 2021.

The boom in TV partly reflects the growth of original broadcast, cable and streaming TV programs, which have more than doubled since 2011, to 559 in 2022, according to PQ Media.

Hot streaming TV series are particular growth-drivers. The primo example is Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” which has included 140 product placements for brands and has hauled in at least $25 million in product placement fees from the series, per estimates.

New seasons and final episodes of a “slew” of major streaming TV series that had been delayed during the peak of COVID-19 either debuted or ended in 2022 on leading streamers.

As the report notes, streaming series including Peacock’s popular “Love Island” have integrated QR codes on screen for buying integrated products, and Roku offered sponsorships and product placements in both scripted and reality shows during this year’s TV upfronts.

Films remain second in product placement revenue, with $2.77 billion in 2021. However, after a 14% plummet in 2020 as COVID shut down theaters and a struggle to ramp back up, films had the slowest growth rate (5.9%) last year.

Streamed movies are driving filmed entertainment’s growth. In 2021, “Don’t Look Up” yielded more than $275 million in placement revenue, and four other streamed movies yielded more than $150 million, PQ reports.

Product placements in digital media grew the fastest in 2021: up 16.3% to $1.97 billion in 2021 due to online influencer, social media and virtual placement deals.

Music had the smallest product placement revenue in 2021 — $302 million — but was the second-fastest growth category (up 13.9%), as brands have ratcheted up product integrations in music videos and lyrics, according to the report.

Samsung presents its Galaxy Z Fold4 as a device one can use to get work done and play games, in a new ad from Publicis Groupe.

This ad features a woman who uses “the ultimate multitasking machine” as a device to shop and play games with, group chat, and work on a spreadsheet.

The foldable phone is on sale for $800 via Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular. A recent review lauded Samsung for tweaking the design. “I can say that the Fold 4 feels less awkward to use in one hand, thanks to its slightly wider shape,” the review from Endgadget reads.

The ad comes as Samsung took the top spot for global smartphone sales in 2021, according to IDC, which noted that it had seen strong interest in foldable phones.

However, IDC reported in July that phone shipment dropped 8.7 percent year over year, a trend IDC attributed partially to inflation.

People have grown more familiar with the technology they need to work or attend classes from home amid the lingering pandemic, but a substantial portion of them still say they feel overwhelmed by the number of devices and subscriptions they need to manage.

The share of U.S. consumers who said …

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While other forms of advertising are struggling, out-of-home advertising rose by 40.5% in the first quarter compared to the same period in 2021, according to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America. That comes after the category expanded by 37% in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Why? We spoke with Dan Dillon, CMO of Reveal Mobile, which provides geofencing marketing and location intelligence for marketers. Below are excerpts of the conversation, edited for clarity.

Marketing Daily: How do you define out-of-home advertising?

Dan Dillon: There are really sort of four flavors.

Traditional out of home is the billboard that you and I might think of as we take a road trip. It's a static, paper on substrate kind of board that doesn't change, and it's highly visible by all kinds of traffic: human motorized and pedestrian traffic.

There is also place-based out of home, which would be bus stops, subways and bus stations.

There is moving out of home, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's ads on the sides of cars and buses. It's ads inside the subway car itself, as opposed to in the station.

And then there's sort of a horizontal category that you might think of as just programmatic or digital out of home, which is a method of programmatic ad buying.

And those are really the four flavors, the three being format and then the fourth one being effectively a buying channel.

Marketing Daily: Why has the performance of OOH ads increased recently?

Dillon: I don't know that performance has improved, but I can tell you that it has one of the highest favorability rating across demographics.

Marketing Daily: Who are the biggest OOH advertisers?

Dillon: I can tell you that we consider out of home to be last-touch attribution -- or sorry, sort of the last-touch channel for in-store shopping and in-store dining. Consumer behavior that's out on the street that might drive you into a Panera as an example, or a pizza place.

The American Academy of Advertising  has data on the largest advertisers by ad spend in terms of brand names. McDonald's, AT&T and Verizon are some of the biggest vendors. And then Netflix is increasingly in that too.

Marketing Daily: What do you predict for the future of OOH advertising?

Dillon: Really the cool thing about home is that it drives three kinds of behaviors. It drives foot traffic into stores. It drives people to take action on a website and purchase whatever they download. And the third one is that it drives people into mobile apps to buy something and to update their information, to fill out a survey or any number of other actions.

So out of home isn't just for getting people to buy the turkey sandwich on a Saturday. It's actually to drive people into all kinds of consumer behaviors. So aside from the conversion environment is the programmatic buying.

And OneScreen.ai, which is a big player in the category, just released a totally free ungated directory of all out-of-home players in the U.S market. So you can go into OneScreen's directory and look up all kinds of owners and operators, measurement companies and effectively buy programmatically through a platform like that.

So, I would say out-of-home ad buying is the next kind of frontier, and measurement remains a steady requirement across any number of those variables.