This study faced several limitations. The first of which was time constraints. Because the study was limited to a two and a half month period, only nine films could be analyzed. While the nine films presented interesting results that suggest the use of product placements over the last ninety years, one or several of the films could be outliers, meaning that they contained an unusual number of placements. The current study also does not consider multiple genres of film, and thus could miss certain genres that use many product placements or other genres that use none.
Another limitation of the current study is that only one coder was used, again due to time constraints. While many placements were coded, the use of a second coder would have been useful to gain a more unbiased opinion of the number and characteristics of placements in the nine films. A second coder could have noticed placements that the one coder did not, and could perceive a placement as having different characteristics.
A third limitation is the coder’s knowledge of products from the past. There were certain instances when branded products could have been shown or mentioned and the coder did not notice them simply because he was unfamiliar with the product or brand, particularly in films from the earliest time period. This could potentially affect the number of placements in the earlier films and thus change the results.
With all these limitations, the current study should serve as an initial study. While valuable results were discovered, the limitations make further research necessary to draw definite conclusions. The trends discovered in this study should lay the foundation for further research by providing a hypothesis to test, namely that product placements have not changed in characteristics drastically but have increased over the years.
