Product placement is a type of advertising where commercial products are included in scenes from films or television shows, as well as in video games, music videos, and books. Firms pay to have their products displayed in this way, and it helps producers offset production costs. It can include the product itself, a favorable mention, or a brand's logo.

A typical example might be a scene in a television series where the characters are sitting at the breakfast table with several products such as a packet of cereal, a milk product and a fruit juice all prominently displayed on the table with labels facing the camera. People see the stars of their favorite shows eating a particular cereal or driving a certain car and will associate the product with those stars. This makes people go and buy these same products, so they can connect with or be like the stars. Sales can be boosted significantly. For example, the 1982 film ET the Extra-Terrestrial' boosted sales of candy bar Reese's Pieces by eighty per cent. Research similar to ad tracking is carried out to test recall rates for products people saw in a movie or television show.

Product placement has been around since at least the 1940s. The earliest example is perhaps in the 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life', where a boy who wanted to be an explorer clutched a copy of National Geographic. Product placement in episodic television series in the 1940s and 1950s by soap companies is how these types of programs came to be known as soap operas'.

One of the products most commonly used in product placement is motor vehicles, such as the use of Fords in The X-Files'. The James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun' used AMC cars, including in Thailand where these cars aren't available, and they didn't even change the steering wheel to the side used in that country. Other Bond movies have used Fords, BMWs and of course Aston Martins. Three characters in Desperate Housewives' drive Nissans. The car used in 1960s sitcom Mr. Ed' was a Studebaker. In all these shows, the car companies paid large sums for product placement.

There are many variations of product placement:
- Brand integration is where the product becomes an integral part of a movie or television show, for example, where a character works for an advertising agency, and its campaign for a particular product becomes an integral part of the show.
- Placement can include advertisements for a product, for example, a Pepsi ad on a billboard seen from a car

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