Montreal Tech Watch

Philippe Gauvin of Magnet Media pointed me to Brandfame, which aims to connect brands and companies to video producers.

Product placement is a common practice in the cinema industry, in subtle and less subtle forms; it associates a movie star to a product, with spectators then more likely to accept the message. With Internet’s case, “product placement” exists already for bloggers with payperpost, although the service has been criticized by many high-profile bloggers as immoral. For online videos, this is however the first company I’ve heard of that offers this service.

In Brandfame’s case, producers makes a list of videos they want to produce, with its theme, target demographics etc. Advertisers and product managers can then search those planned videos and make an offer to get their product placed somewhere in the video. Brandfame also tracks number of views for each video for advertisers, giving them a way to grasp their campaign’s success.

Online video is the fastest growing market on the web, with Youtube, dailymotion, metacafe, revver, proving long ago that there is an ever-growing audience for home videos. Rewarding content producers is still though an unsolved problem: metacafe’s members get a cut of the advertising, while Youtube plans to insert 30-sec bumper ads directly into the videos. I doubt however that home and professionnal video makers recoup their costs with this kind of advertising, and Brandfame can provide them a way to get additionnal revenues.

Update: SpringWise has also today a post about Brandfame