News & analysis
Omnicom and Rembrand Scale AI Product Placement
Omnicom Media and in-content ad platform Rembrand have partnered to let brands identify, plan and place ads inside premium streaming content after it's already been shot.
By Roomer Editorial · · 3 min read
What did Omnicom and Rembrand announce?
Omnicom Media is working with Rembrand, an in-content advertising platform, to place brand ads inside streaming shows after production. Omnicom calls it a first-to-market capability. The deal lets brands insert into scenes that have already been filmed, rather than negotiating placement during the show's production.
Omnicom is still negotiating with several streaming media companies and hasn't named any publisher partners yet.
How does the technology work?
Rembrand's platform, called VISTA, uses AI to scan existing streaming content and flag scenes that can carry a brand insertion. Omnicom's Content Collective team, its branded content unit, then builds out those placements.
Omnicom layers its own audience tools on top. Its RealID product, run through Acxiom, matches brand audience data against streamer viewership numbers to pick which shows make sense for a given advertiser. That gets mapped against whatever scenes VISTA has identified as available.
Anna Castro, who runs Content Collective, said the goal is figuring out "where does a brand have permission to play" before building anything. She described the old version of product placement as manual and difficult to scale, something this partnership is meant to fix.
A packaged goods brand, for example, could be inserted into a cooking show episode after the fact, then reinforced with a separate ad buy in the same program's ad pods.
What results has Omnicom reported?
Omnicom's Partner Intelligence team ran research with Rembrand on in-content ad effectiveness. When paired with a traditional video ad, the format produced a 5.5x increase in message recall and a 4x increase in both purchase intent and perception of the brand as premium, according to the companies.
Megan Pagliuca, Omnicom's chief product officer for North America, said this is the first time this kind of insertion tool has been built directly into the buy side's workflow — historically it's lived on the sell side. She said Omnicom has secured inventory from multiple streaming publishers that hadn't been accessible this way before, though she declined to name them.
Cox Automotive, which owns Auto Trader and Kelley Blue Book, is an early Omnicom client interested in the capability, according to the company.
What's still unresolved?
Pricing. Asked whether Omnicom charges a premium for the placements, Pagliuca said rates vary by network and called the capability "a bit of a nascent capability," adding that rate discounts should follow as volume scales.
Which streamers are participating is also unresolved. Digiday reported Omnicom is in talks with several media companies but couldn't name them due to active negotiations.
Roomer Editorial's take
This is a story about who controls the placement, and it's worth watching for a reason that has nothing to do with streaming TV.
Travel creators already do in-content advertising. A hotel named in a Lisbon walkthrough, a tour operator tagged mid-reel, a restaurant mentioned in a food crawl — that's product placement, just without the AI scene-scanning. The difference is who owns the booking link attached to it.
What Omnicom and Rembrand are building is a system where a third party decides where a brand shows up, not the person whose audience is actually watching. That's the opposite of the model we'd point creators toward. If a creator posts a video about a hotel, the commission on anyone who books because of that video should go to the creator, on a page the creator controls — not get routed through a platform deciding placement on their behalf after the fact.
Roomer Pro is built around that distinction: your own site, built from your own videos, with bookable pages and 100% of commissions when someone books on your own site. Booking rails come from Vio, Stay22, GetYourGuide, Viator and Klook. No agency sits between the mention and the money.
The Omnicom deal is a sign that big ad budgets are moving toward automated, scaled in-content placement. Travel creators should take that as confirmation their attention has value — and as a reason to make sure the booking link sitting under that attention is one they own, not one licensed out by somebody else's AI.
If you're a travel creator mentioning hotels, tours or restaurants on camera, put a bookable link under that mention on a page you control, before someone else automates the version that doesn't pay you.
Source: Digiday — Omnicom Media and Rembrand partner to evolve in-content ad placements
