I Assure You, Mr. Busey, the Ad’s Placement Was Entirely Unintentional …
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 4, 2008 at 2:24 PM PT
In Futurama, our characters are thoroughly inundated by advertising, especially subliminal advertising that comes out of your pillow into your dreams.
How do you persuade TV viewers to watch advertisements when the DVR has accustomed them to skip through them? That’s the dilemma facing television and cable networks today, one that’s so far defied a solution. But perhaps not for much longer.
The Times Online reports that the evil geniuses at Keystream have developed a new overlay advertising system that scans video content for open spaces–an unadorned wall, for instance–and slaps an ad on it, embedding it directly into the programming.
“There’s a lot of potential,” said Simon Fell, head of future technology at ITV, a company that’s testing Keystream’s technology on its ITV Local site. “If there’s a scene in a program where there’s time, then it could give us a chance to get an ad away. But obviously on television you won’t be seeing one of these appearing at a crunch point in a drama.”
Really? In this age of product placement? Ever see the list of brands plugged in the “Sex and The City” movie?
If ITV’s tests prove successful it’s only a matter of time before we begin seeing Garmin GPS ads etched into the beaches of “Lost” or Levitra logos popping up willy-nilly on “Desperate Housewives.”
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