Production company Endemol has entered into a joint venture with embedded advertising specialist MirriAd in a bid to exploit embedded advertising opportunities in the Indian market.
The agreement opens the way for Endemol's broadcasting partners to make use of product and brand placement opportunities that are fully incorporated within core programming.
MirriAd's ZoneSense system will be used to insert simple branded objects such as props, backdrops and signage, or sophisticated dynamic ads, into video content. The brand references are seamlessly embedded and appear as if they had been incorporated in the original production. With embedded advertising the brand references can't be skipped or ignored as they are an intrinsic element of the viewing experience.
The technology allows any video to be automatically scanned for suitable advertising zones. These zones are then tracked frame by frame for the duration that they are visible for motion, blur and brightness for every pixel within the frame. Any brand or image inserted into one of these pre-tracked zones inherits all of the same blur, reflection and brightness attributes of the original material, making the insertion look real and as though it was part of the original shoot
Using MirriAd's secure online services advertisers can select their preferred zones, insert their brand images and view a low quality stream of the embedded advertising video before they commit to a final, high quality version.
"Traditional product placement is a very well established and successful model in the Indian broadcast market but it is time consuming, the returns are difficult for advertisers to assess in the pre-production phase and the value inevitably diminishes over time. In contrast, embedding advertising within existing content takes us to a higher level of sophistication and removes the uncertainty and expense associated with the established model," commented Ankush Patel Endemol India's head of corporate development & strategic business development. "MirriAd's technology enables placement opportunities to be identified automatically and gives advertisers complete control over where and when their brand references appear. Furthermore, they have the opportunity to time insertions according to campaign requirements, just as they would with 'slot' based advertising."
