"Fool’s gold”: Linking materialism to persuasion knowledge activation and susceptibility to embedded advertising

Within the first two seconds of the music video for “Focus” (2015), the artist Ariana Grande debuts a Samsung phone—clearly showing the brand logo and using the product to write the title of the track. The usage and incorporation of a brand into a storyline is an advertising technique known as embedded advertising, as the brand is embedded into the content (Bhatnagar et al., 2003). Although this practice is used in other forms of media such as television, movies, vlogs, and video games, embedded advertising usage in music videos grew by 15.9% in 2015 with over 1,100 brands working with artists (PQ Media, 2015; Smith, 2017).