Submission + - Digital Tech and the Re-Birth of Product Placement (wsj.com)
pbahra writes: "When you think of product placement on television you tend to think of cumbersome 1950s examples where the actor would cheesily turn to camera and hold up say a bar of soap—where do you think the sobriquet soap opera came from—to deliver his line. Perhaps to save all of us the artistic murder, the practice was prohibited in Europe, but recently the prohibition has been relaxed and a U.K. start up is offering digital producers the chance to inject products realistically in post production with full directorial control. The problem with existing physical product placement is that there are no clear business plans, and the process is incredibly slow. In Europe, legal constraints prohibit directors from re-writing scripts to include products, so any placement has to be done at the creative stage. “This means 9-12 months to get the result from the idea of introducing a brand into a show to broadcast,” says Mark Popkiewicz, CEO of MirriAd.
For three of its four years, says Mr. Popkiewicz, the company was building and perfecting the technology that allows it to process, in quicker than real time, video to identify opportunities to inject products after shooting, and the parallel technology to scan the product and inject it into the video unobtrusively. The key to success is two fold: artistically how well the products blend into the movie, and commercially, how successful it is for the advertisers."
For three of its four years, says Mr. Popkiewicz, the company was building and perfecting the technology that allows it to process, in quicker than real time, video to identify opportunities to inject products after shooting, and the parallel technology to scan the product and inject it into the video unobtrusively. The key to success is two fold: artistically how well the products blend into the movie, and commercially, how successful it is for the advertisers."
