Rembrand is a leading programmatic product placement platform. The company uses AI to generate memorable, natural, effective product placement in digital video. To learn more, Pulse 2.0 interviewed Rembrand CEO Omar Tawakol.
Omar Tawakol’s Background
Tawakol’s father taught him a profound sense of curiosity and he ended up studying computer science, which opened up a whole world of possibilities. Tawakol said:
“Although I spent my first 8 years in America and all my adult life here, I also spent my middle and high school years in Egypt. As an Egyptian American, I became convinced that if Egypt was going to lift itself out of poverty, it would have to rely on innovation and not natural resources. That gave me a sense of purpose that has propelled me to build companies that had technology and innovation at their core.”
Formation Of Rembrand
How did the idea for Rembrand come together? Tawakol reflected:
“Several years ago, I became convinced that manipulating audio and video streams with AI would become table stakes for any consumer application (think about background filters, voice translation, etc). I also understood that building world-class AI takes an enormous amount of data and computing. So I wanted to build the technology that would make it easy for applications to do this ‘stream filtering’. I just needed to find the killer application that would launch the business. As I was studying different domains, I saw that Virtual Product Placement was gaining steam – but that much of the actual work was far too expensive and manual. That’s when I realized that if you could apply AI to automate the fusion of products into post-production video, you could disrupt a large industry. Because I came from the marketing technology industry, going back to my roots and applying AI to this area became very appealing.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for Rembrand so far? Tawakol shared:
“Going back to my first Advertising industry event (after leaving the industry for a few years) was like walking back into the bar at Cheers. Everybody knows each other, and it is a fun industry. Also, the introduction of generative AI technology into the industry is infusing a sense of energy and excitement.”
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges Tawakol faced in building the company and has the macroeconomic climate affected the company? Tawakol acknowledged:
“Building any company is always full of challenges because there are so many moving parts to the business. Challenges from who to bring on and when, where to raise money (and when), to the development of the MVP, and securing product market fit so you can replicate it and grow. For Rembrand specifically, we are trying to create an entirely new form of scalable advertising by making your brand part of the story and not an interruption.”
“It’s the concept of your brand reaching an audience in a way that helps them take notice, but without interrupting quality content. Consumers mostly skip or ignore interruptive advertising.”
“Advertising needs to evolve with the needs of the audience, and the audience is spending more time with video, and they are paying to avoid the ads. If you look at the subscriber numbers for paid platforms that have no ads, they are continuing to grow. This creates an opportunity to fashion a new way of bringing brands to consumers, and that is what Rembrand is looking to do. Creating a new category of scalable advertising solutions is difficult. That is the challenge we are looking to solve with AI.”
Core Products
What are Rembrand’s core products and features? Tawakol explained:
“Our core solution currently is Product Placement powered by Generative AI. We have created a solution we refer to as Physics-Informed Generative AI(C) that enables technology to identify the proper locations and insert hyper-realistic products into digital video. Our insertions look seamless and natural, but can also feature animations and call-outs that bring attention to them while not interrupting the content.”
“These insertions are done automatically, in post-production, which means they are able to be done after the content was created and can scale to the needs of brands looking to reach a variety of audiences. The creators maintain their creative integrity and can produce their content in a timely fashion, while Rembrand matches them to advertisers who can monetize their content in exchange for access to an audience.”
Evolution Of Rembrand’s Technology
How has Rembrand’s technology evolved since launching? Tawakol noted:
“The technology continues to advance as we build what we refer to as the Foundation Model for virtual product placement. The technology first identifies where an appropriate and natural insertion point would be. It then breaks down the video and analyzes for shot clusters in camera location, occlusions that may cover up the insertion, and additional elements like lighting, depth, proportional location, and more. It then creates a 3-dimensional model for the product and inserts it directly into the composition of the video in such a way that it is standardized by point of reference, by spatial distance and time in the video.”
“Product placement in this way is difficult – you have to make sure the item looks the same relatively from multiple angles and under different lighting conditions. It has to look natural. None of this was truly possible prior to the advancements seen in AI the last year, and what we are building will be the foundation for any company to do non-interruptive insertions into videos in the future. Our goal is to become the primary way of providing content creators the tools to monetize their videos in a non-interruptive fashion. We are releasing a series of self service tools that enable creators and marketers to perform virtual product placement without having to be VFX experts.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Rembrand’s most significant milestones? Tawakol cited:
“Finding our first set of influencers who were ready to experiment and try something new was very exciting. I found that influencers are very entrepreneurial, and they have great ideas. So we would come in with ideas – but after sharing with them, it would always evolve for the better. So I would say that initial launch in early February was a very significant milestone for us.”
Customer Success Stories
Upon asking Tawakol about a customer success story, he commented: “Rembrand is currently in pilot mode with a number of great brands, including L’Oreal and other great brands. So far, all campaigns have been successful at raising awareness of the brand and getting people to take notice. I can’t share the specific data on campaigns at this time, but what we have found really interesting is watching the comments made by some of the people in the audience. A few times, our product insertions have captured the attention and been called out in the commentary of the video itself, and some of the comments are funny. People do take note, and there’s been no negativity associated with the insertions. So far, so good!”
Funding
Rembrand launched in February with $9 million in seed funding from sources such as Greycroft and United Talent Agency (UTA) among a number of angels and small groups. Tawakol also revealed:
“We also took in funding from some brands such as L’Oreal and Good Friends, which is a venture firm started by the founders of AllBirds, Warby Parker, and Harry’s. This funding has been used to build out the team and develop the Foundation Model we are using for our AI. In terms of revenue, Rembrand is an advertising platform, and we generate revenue through two methods.”
“One is the use of our marketplace, which connects brands and content creators for campaigns. In this model, a brand will provide a creative brief, and we work with them to curate a list of content creators who match their needs and deliver the audience they are looking to engage. In our other model, we operate a pure platform that a larger publisher or studio will use to insert product placement directly into their premium content. In that model, we work with the publisher or creator, and they manage the direct relationship with the brand, not utilizing our salesforce. Both models deliver revenue to Rembrand, while delivering varying levels of service to the customers we work with.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Rembrand pursuing? Tawakol assessed:
“Product Placement is a multi-billion dollar global business, with very long lead times that is mostly dominated by large studios and entertainment companies. We think our tools can democratize access to the product placement model while delivering a new format for online video advertising. That means we should be able to tap into the $75 billion online video advertising market and merge these two areas of the business together.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Rembrand from its competition? Tawakol pointed out:
“Our product placement platform is entirely operated through AI technology. There are other companies in the category who use AI, but they leverage AI to identify the insertion opportunities and then engage visual effects designers to create and insert product placement into the videos. That process takes weeks to execute and can be expensive and full of back-and-forth negotiation.”
“Our technology-first solution enables a full insertion to be created in hours. That means online content creators can maintain their schedule of content creation, and still monetize with product placement. This model of end-to-end AI-driven insertions scales better and provides more flexibility to the industry and with the direction of content development we are seeing across the board.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Rembrand’s future company goals? Tawakol concluded:
“We want to become essential infrastructure for the entire virtual product placement industry. We want every influencer, every publisher, every brand and every movie studio to benefit from our technology either directly or indirectly by embedding our API into every participant in the ecosystem. Product placement is a multi-billion dollar industry now, even though it is a very manual process. We think that automation can grow the size of the industry multiple times and we want to be the player to enable that.”
“Consumers love content. Brands want reach. Brands have been addicted to reaching consumers by interrupting their content-viewing experience. Consumers don’t like the interruptions. We can and should change that by making brands part of the story and not an interruption to it.”
