Ross Levine

News

Vevo and Mirriad Now Let You Retroactively Put Products and Placements in Videos

Product placement. If you're a director or producer, you love the money, but hate the strings that come attached: Ceding editorial and treatment control to a third party who might care more about their product shots than making something that serves the greater goal. Also, you hate the agency people on set. And if you're an agency, you hate having to fund a bulk of a video budget and then getting pushed back at every step. Also, you hate being on set with all those production pirates.

So, what if you could retroactively make placements in videos: Affixing advertisements to bare walls, changing storefronts to national chains and all sorts of other digital chicanery.

Genius, right? VEVO has teamed with international company Mirriad — who specialize in "advertising for the skip generation" — to make it happen with music videos. The initiative was first teased via an AdAge report and then announced at the video streaming giant's NewFronts presentation last night,.

First up for the co-venture is Aloe Blacc "The Man" and the newly inserted Levi's ads are constrained just to the VEVO.com version (and not the YouTube.com)...

Next up is all sorts of potential genius... Maybe a body groomer would work great in "Big Bad Wolf"?

In Depth

Solving the Placebo "Too Many Friends" Video with Director Saman Kesh

Placebo "Too Many Friends" is one of those great videos that can be easily summed-up in a couple bullet-points to a newbie — it's narrated by author Bret Easton Ellis and ends with a quiz — but also stands up to repeated viewings and close studies. The video is a mystery, but also a critique about how we've been lulled into submission by our digital devices and the well-chose pharmaceutical.

We recently chatted with director Saman Kesh via email about how the video came together, the irony of it all, and what it means — including how the video is slyly, if a bit coincidentally connected to The Dark Knight Rises.

Watch It

Placebo "Too Many Friends" (Saman Kesh, dir.)

Narrator Bret Easton Ellis — yes, the dude who wrote Less Than Zero — and director Saman Kesh (aka Saman Keshavarz) explore the anatomy of a seemingly simple scene that reveals itself to be far more complex upon closer inspection. But the moral here isn't the unreliability of perception; it's the danger of relying on technology and drugs that actually amplify, instead of serving our desires and fears. 

Watch It

Bastille "Laura Palmer" (Austin Peters, dir.)

Bastille - Laura Palmer

Despite the lack of a log lady, this video takes some unexpected twists as director Austin Peters goes a bit meta: What looks like a fairly stock performance video with trendy VHS camcorder touches,  random outlaw b-roll characters, and even some "hey, we're making a video" behind-the-scenes stills becomes something else entirely when those random folks storm the set, kidnaps Bastille singer Dan Smith and decide to make their own damn video.