Rembrand CEO Omar Tawakol on Generative AI and Product Placement in Videos – Voicebot Podcast 332
Product placement is a very large market that was ripe for disruption…We are at the nexus of three trends. The main one is product placement. But the other two are closely related. Number two, if you think about video, time spent in video, it is exploding. You are talking about TikTok and YouTube being viewed in your living room more than you are viewing other things. It’s amazing. But the big flaw in everything we are doing to monteize video is that people hate interruptive ads…The whole idea we have is we want to go native format that is non-interruptive. That is what product placement is…The broader idea here is how do we monetize content in a way that works for everybody.
One more component. If you look at the adtech-martech ecosystem, for 20 years all of the billions of investment went into this concept of efficiency…What was totally untouched…[was] effectiveness. Now with generative AI we have this capability to manipulate the creative itself and generate the creative itself. That’s where we’ve been focusing, which is use a form a generative techniques to figure out how they can embed native things that don’t interrupt and change the content. So, these trends happily come together inside of Rembrand.
Omar Tawakol is CEO and co-founder Rembrand, a company using generative AI and other AI models to automate product placement in online videos. Earlier this year, he announced an $8 million seed funding round and this month added several more strategic investors.
Rembrand represents a return to Tawakol’s roots in advertising technology and his graduate work in AI. He saw there was an underutilized opportunity for product placement at scale that could be delivered cost-effectively for online influencers. AI is enabling the company to significantly expand the market.
Tawakol was my guest for Episode 61 in 2018. At the time, he was CEO of Voicera, which later rebranded to Voicea and then was acquired by Cisco 2019. Voicea was an early leader in the automated meeting transcription space and pioneered novel architectures that led to rapid increases in performance.
Earlier in his career, Tawakol was CEO of Blue Kai, the leading DMP for enterprise marketers. The company was acquired by Oracle in 2016, and he then served as SVP of Oracle Data Cloud. He was formerly a board director at PlaceIQ and is a board member for Liveramp.
Omar Tawakol Interview – Show Notes Rembrand
- Follow Rembrand on Twitter and the web: @getrembrand rembrand.com
- Follow Omar Tawakol on Twitter: @otawakol
- Read about Rembrand in Voicebot: Generative AI Product Placement Startup Rembrand Raises $8 Million
Follow @bretkinsella Follow @voicebotai
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