All Things Digital

In Futurama, our characters are thoroughly inundated by advertising, especially subliminal advertising that comes out of your pillow into your dreams.

– Futurama creator Matt Groening, February 1999

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.”

“We feel that we have recreated the mass media.” That’s how Google’s Kim Malone Scott, in a moment of Zuckerbergian modesty, described the company’s video syndication service that will debut this fall and, shortly thereafter, transform online content distribution.

Working with Seth MacFarlane, creator of the “Family Guy” animated series, Google (GOOG) will in September begin distributing “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” a series of digital shorts
to be embedded on Web sites as free, ad-supported streams.
About two minutes in length, the shorts–which MacFarlane describes as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier”–will be syndicated through Google’s AdSense advertising system, which will target them at MacFarlane-friendly segments of the Web. Some will be accompanied by standard pre- or post-roll ads, some by “brought to you by” tags, and others by original commercials created by MacFarlane.

The shorts are essentially like little Assisted Ad Delivery Devices, intelligently targeting advertisements at those receptive to viewing them. “We believe the revenue could be formidable,” said Karl Austen, a lawyer who worked on the deal. “What is exciting is that this is a way to monetize the Internet immediately. Instead of creating a Web site and hoping Seth’s fans find it, we are going to push the content to where people are already at.”