3 ways how AI automation can streamline video advertising

Industry professionals will tell you that video advertising is like a war.

Anything goes in here: from the carefully curated video advertisements on TV to funky and relatable clips, reels, and stories on the web.

On top of regular advertisement blocks, companies arrange to have their logos and products appear in influencers’ videos, movies, broadcasts, and TV shows — everywhere you can think.

But with that comes a lot of work that drains a ton of resources and takes too much time to get rolling.

Let’s talk about how AI automation can help speed things up.

How video content advertising works

Whatever the type of video advertising you’re dealing with, you can be certainly sure that any of it will be an involved process from coming up with the idea for content to putting it out somewhere.

It usually takes a whole team of people who are in charge of a variety of tasks. The first stage is the inception. Here’s what the team does:

• Researches the target audience;
• Comes up with the idea for an advertisement;
• Shapes up the advertisement.

Then begins the creation part. Creatives pitch in doing their part:

• Writing the scripts, drawing prototypes, or making sketches;
• Going on to film, shoot, or draw the content;
• Then it’s off to the editing room, where the final piece of content comes out.

But there are other aspects of video advertising that are less creatively heavy but still incredibly demanding in terms of resources: taking the ad to the video content viewers.

Actually inserting a particular advertisement, logo, or product in video content often takes a lot of time. You have to deal with ad buyers and/or media companies to work out a deal to have your advertising appear in video content in any shape or form.

And you don’t have a ton of control over that part of the process:

• You strike a deal with a media company to, say, have your video ad appear during a particular broadcast;
• You hand over the asset;
• And you wait, hoping nothing goes wrong.

On the opposite side of things, media companies have to manually manage their programming and broadcasting activities in order to fit the ads into the content, which only adds to their workload. That includes producers scheduling ad breaks, choosing the right ads, interrupting the broadcasts for said ad breaks at the right time, and so on.

But we are here to tell you that there’s a lot you can do to lighten the load, increasing the effectiveness of video content advertising for both advertisers and media companies.

How AI automation helps streamline video advertising

Let’s get things straight right away: we are not talking about AI making art or writing copy. AI taking over the creative process in its entirety is counterproductive and requires a lot of oversight.

And that besides rising concerns over AI pedaling misinformation or plagiarizing art created by humans.

What are we offering then? Using technology to automate the mundane part of the advertising process that would lighten the workload for creatives and allow them to focus on their main responsibilities.

Let’s see what tasks in the advertising field can be facilitated by AI tools.

Logo detection reinvents product placement

Previously placing the product or brand logo right inside the video content was a whole thing for video advertising to pull off.

You had to make deals with creators — for instance, the movie studios — to have a lead actor use your product, wear the clothes you produce, or simply pass by a billboard or poster with your branding on it.

And it might take a lot of time before your ad placement can make it to the viewers’ screens and into their minds. It’s less of an issue with online platforms like YouTube, where bloggers on average spend around 70 hours producing their content.

But there are big-budget movies that could take a couple of years to make if there aren’t any issues down the road. And there are many issues that can and will stand in the way of that movie.

Recently the situation has changed though. Now you can use logo detection software powered by AI to automatically put logos and other branding inside the video content even after it was shot and cut. In the modern world, where video content gets hosted on different platforms, it is beneficial for media companies to replace product placements to bring in some more advertising profits.

In that case, streaming services don’t have to rely on ad breaks that much, and on the other end viewers just see a KFC cup instead of a Burger King.

That can be made possible with automated AI logo detection. The software relies on geometrical assessment and computer vision to find logos, ads, and other branded content, so you could have it replaced to suit your needs.

Video ad replacement allows you to repurpose content

As an OTT platform, it’s not every time that you get to broadcast content of your own making. For a variety of reasons you may get content from a third party, and sometimes it may even come with video advertisements included.

Or maybe you got some of your old recordings lying around with ads in them.

If you decided to air it again, why would you miss out on those sweet video advertising profits?

That part is where AI can also lend a helping hand.

You just boot up the pipeline and sit back: the AI ad detection and replacement software will break the footage down into scenes, analyze them to find the advertisements, and then swap those for the ads of your choosing.

As a result, you get to air the content once again, get some new brand deals, and insert new advertisements, therefore increasing the effectiveness of your operation along with profits.

Ad insertion ensures spot-on targeting

Let’s keep it real: viewers don’t really like video advertising. The major reason for it is that advertising simply exists.

But keeping in mind that ads are a civil compromise between delivering the content to viewers and remaining profitable to continue on that track, we can boil the criticism down to two major problems.

Here are the main issues the viewers have with video advertising:

• The ads break up the content;
• The ads are mostly boring.

Luckily, clever implementation of AI automation tools can help media companies and advertisers solve those issues.

Enter the automated ad insertion software. It uses complex technology to analyze the footage to do two things:

• Determine the best possible spot for ad placement, solving the issue of advertisements awkwardly breaking up content;
• Identify the theme and context of analyzed footage to insert the relevant ads, so a CS:GO major broadcast can have ads from Intel or Razer.

Bottom line

Video advertising remains a powerful tool for brands to get their name out there. And while making a decent video ad takes a lot of time, that number gets dwarfed by the lag advertisers experience when working with first-party content creators.

Having a movie studio use your product in a film or striking a deal with a TV network to insert your ad into their ad breaks results in days, weeks, or even months before your advertisement appears in front of an audience.

So, we are offering AI automation as a way to speed the process up:

• With automated logo detection, you can find ad placements in video content and replace them with your own products or logos. That helps with content repurposing;
• Video ad replacement works in the same manner, but it looks for video ads to swap;
• Ad insertion puts ads relevant to the main content so that the audience of said content could get some use from the advertisement. And yeah — ads perform more effectively that way.

If you want to introduce automation to your advertising or content creation workflow — go on and talk to us! You can email us at support@cognitivemill.com or fill in the form below.