A couple of decades ago Princeton Video Image tried doing this but the advertisers didn’t go for it. It was a logical extension of their technology of inserting advertisements into sports broadcasts.
This is the sort of “reasoning” that always keeps me from enjoying the syndicated reruns of WKRP. The latest release restored some of thew original music, but until Pink Floyd stops being assholes about my favorite television joke ever, I just can’t even try.
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No one wanted to be associated with the obvious flop that the first one was sure to be, based on a no-name superhero group and starring the goofball from Parks and Rec.
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Why stop at classic films? /s
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The product placement there was one of the best jokes in an excellent movie.
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Still bitter about when Apple altered the infamous “1984” commercial to give the runner an iPod.
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I love that shot of C3PO riding on the fighter wing
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I wouldn’t be surprised to see them just fall back to regular commercials, like the ones found on “free” services like IMDB. That takes less effort. It also eliminates the problem of finding products to fit the film. Many “epic” films already have intermissions that could be replaced by ads.
IMO, they’re targeting seniors. Many in my family have been complaining for a couple of years that their cable providers moved all the classic movie channels into premium packages. They don’t want to pay more for a bunch of channels in which they have no interest, just so they can watch classic films. However, they’re not tech-savvy enough to become cord cutters.
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For them (and others who’ve mentioned here that the classic films aren’t on many streaming services), if you don’t know about it, Kanopy is a sweet service. It’s usually free with library membership, and the free version comes with one film credit per month. Tons of classic and indie films. The credit expires at the end of the month, so it makes us plan, makes it more of an event than just scrolling through Netflix on a given evening.
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And I said what about Breakfast at Tiffany’s
She said I think I remember the film
And as I recall I think there were two pairs of nikes
And I said well that’s some good product placement
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I went to a presentation, possibly by this company (can’t recall), that showed a similar technology for showing realtime location-specific advertising on the hoardings of international football matches.
Seriously, how long before you can just click that placement/ad in the movie? Hopefully it’s inevitable, since otherwise I’ll probably burn in hell for bringing it up …
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was set in our galaxy.
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My god man, file the patent and sit on it!
Is this really a new technology? I seem to remember hearing about this years ago, maybe around the time Friends went into syndication. They were replacing Jones Cola with Pepsi or somesuch.
I just assumed this had been going on for at least a decade.
Yeah, though seriously I could see their solution deployed algorithmically (in ways that are even more obvious), by just replacing random background text with product names/logos.
Ok, it technically is, but it might as well not be - once you’re in alien-land, it doesn’t matter what galaxy it is. And there’s nothing stopping even Star Wars, despite being both in a galaxy far, far away and a long time ago, from having product placement in the form of… well, what they’ve already done, albeit not (yet) in a movie:
Not sure what this has to do with AI or just bog standard compositing techniques?
The difference is in the automation, which makes it cheap enough to do multiple versions with different products based on the viewing audience or market. Making it fast and cheap to do, seamlessly through machine learning algorithms, changes the economics of doing this on a large scale.
Stephan Beringer, CEO of Mirriad, says the placements can be performed a few hours before airing, suggesting the output rendering is very fast, and that their production for China’s Tencent works with Tencent’s back end to provide just the altered snippets that will let Tencent’s system dynamically swap them out automatically without having to provide a complete render of the entire movie.
Beringer calls automatically scanning shows for places where ads could be composited “fracking of content” - which kind of tells you his attitude towards the audience experience of altering movies into dynamic billboards for products.
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