According to foreign media Ad Exchanger, artificial intelligence startup Rembrand has completed an 8 million US dollars (about 56.94 million yuan) seed round led by Greycroft and UTA Ventures and participated by BOLD, a venture capital fund of L'Oreal Group, which will fund Rembrand's employee expansion.
Rembrand has developed a new technology that digitally inserts realistic product images into existing videos through artificial intelligence and allows product images to be placed in content that has already been filmed. This technology is designed to simplify complex product placement negotiations and help advertisers seamlessly insert ads into the content they have already created, which is what interest L'Oréal.
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Product placement will be revolutionized by artificial intelligence
Product placement is a classic form of advertising, and for years, many brands have conducted protracted business negotiations to mention their products in film and television scripts, and even sponsoring KOLs on social media may take more than a month of phone and email communication to arrange, and the coordination between the content of the video itself and the content of the advertisement has always been a big problem.
Because the negotiation process for product placement is so long, advertisers tend to focus on top KOLs with a large number of subscribers, but small and medium-sized creators on social media have enthusiastic audiences that are easily missed by brands.
Omar Tawakol, an ad technologist aware of these issues, founded a new company, Rembrand, in February to experiment with using generative AI to transform the script of video product placement.
Although bloggers' pre-recorded oral ads can also be dynamically inserted into videos, the communication effect is often not ideal, and users do not like to be forced to watch ad insertion in the video, which also makes the ad design less scalable.
"In this industry, it's outdated to interrupt a show for an audience to watch an ad for one or two minutes." Omar Tawakol said, "Our approach is for creators to focus on producing their original content and not having to worry about branding until they choose what to stitch into the video in post-production. ”
Rembrand works through a technique known as physics-informed generative AI (i.e., AI-generated virtual elements that follow the laws of physics in the real world).
Rather than simply image or text generators, this technique analyzes every frame in an existing video to understand light, shadows, reflectivity, motion, occlusion, and camera angles, and then digitally inserts realistic product images or animations into the creator's video, such as having a can of soda naturally on a table or a few bottles of shampoo dancing on a shelf in the background.
"The product is there, and people can see it throughout the video without interrupting the show or skipping anything." Omar Tawakol said.
In addition to its market-based business model, Rembrand has an up-and-coming API business that licenses its plug-in technology to streaming platforms and the entertainment industry to help automate the process of plugging in virtual product content.
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The beauty giant's tech dream
In the beauty industry, people's perception of artificial intelligence has moved from simple product experience and makeup color trial to a more digital field that is more closely connected to the frontier of technology. It can be said that Rembrand is a real artificial intelligence company, different from those previous projects that use artificial intelligence as a marketing gimmick, it has the opportunity to bring profound changes to the marketing level of the beauty industry.
L'Oréal's "ambition" is far from being limited to just a beauty company, and "the world's first beauty technology company" is L'Oréal's "sea of stars". ”
As early as 2014, L'Oréal officially launched its Digital Beauty strategy, announcing that it would become a leader in the digital beauty era. In 2018, L'Oréal Group launched its Beauty Tech strategy, which took the Group's digital transformation to a new stage - "Beyond Digital", the year L'Oréal acquired ModiFace to apply virtual reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to the beauty industry.
L'Oréal, which focuses on discovering "potential stocks", has established extensive cooperation with incubators such as Founder's Factory and Station F, and has launched its own venture capital fund BOLD (Business Opportunities for L'Oréal Development) to make minority investments in innovative start-ups with high growth potential.
As a start-up founded less than half a year ago, Rembrand has received an olive branch from L'Oréal with its innovative artificial intelligence technology, which also meets L'Oréal's investment tendency in "beauty technology", "new generation" and "personalization".
Investing in a pure artificial intelligence technology company, L'Oréal is proving its commitment to the goal of "beauty technology".