SeamBI is a digital brand integration company that virtually inserts brand imagery into already produced television content. SeamBI solves the growing problem of DVR ad-skipping by enabling local and national advertisers to get their brand in front of viewers by making it an authentic and unavoidable part of the content. SeamBI has created an online sales platform that allows broadcasters to sell these insertions just days prior to air.

As a senior advisor, Littlefield will help SeamBI and industry leaders standardize and accept the value of non-storyline digital integrations, or in-show ad units, which is a form of ad inventory that will increasingly become more common. Littlefield’s involvement is expected to further strengthen SeamBI’s partnerships and trust with content owners.

“Warren clearly has a knack for spotting a hit, and has the expertise and foresight to help us shape the advertising landscape,” said Roy Baharav, CEO, SeamBI. “His extensive broadcast experience and the unparalleled respect that the industry has for him make him a huge asset to the SeamBI team, and we are lucky to have him.”

As president of NBC, Littlefield was responsible for numerous groundbreaking series, including Frasier, Friends, Seinfeld, ER, Will & Grace, The West Wing and others. He also developed the iconic series Cheers, The Cosby Show and Golden Girls when he formerly served as senior and executive vice president of NBC.

“With challenges such as DVR-penetration and declining audiences facing today’s broadcast and cable networks, it’s become harder than ever to make the business work,” said Littlefield. “SeamBI has developed a truly outstanding solution to these challenges, and I’m pleased to be part of a team that has the potential to secure the future of quality programming by creating brand new revenue opportunities.”

Littlefield is not the only high-profile television veteran on the SeamBI team. Bob Cook, the former president and COO of 20th Television, has served since last year as the company’s content distribution expert and has guided the company’s forays into the syndication and international marketplace, where it has active relationships with several broadcasters.

About SeamBI
SeamBI is an advertising technology innovator that enables brands to virtually embed images into existing television, film and Internet content through its advanced interactive technology. The SeamBI process guarantees advertisers targeted audience exposure. Top-tier brands regularly use SeamBI’s patented technology for digital product placement including Ford, McDonald’s, Geico, Honda, Subway and many more. SeamBI was founded in Israel by Roy Baharav, Guy Morgenstern and Dr. Miky Tamir in 2006. Today the company is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. For more information, please visit www.Seambi.com or follow SeamBI on Twitter at http://twitter.com/SeamBI.
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On one hand, rising DVR penetration is making it easier for more and more television viewers to skip through ads, a trend that has forced advertisers and content owners to reconsider measurement standards and the value of “DVR-proof” programming. But on the other hand, the commercial break is still the lynchpin of the television business, as evidenced by the fact that advertisers were willing to pay as much as $3 million for each 30-second ad that ran during the Super Bowl.

Still, SeamBI co-founder and CEO Roy Baharav thinks now is the time to begin looking for new, more effective ways to monetize television programming. “The commercial — it’s a good solution, it gives a lot of value to advertisers — but it’s not going to provide the same value that it provided in the last 50 years,” Baharav told SNL Kagan. He explained that he sees two main challenges with the traditional ad format.

The first, of course, is rising DVR penetration. “As we progress in the next three or four years, what will happen is that DVR penetration will continue to grow, and we’ll see people using the DVR more and more,” Baharav said. “The 30-second commercials on television are going to become weaker and weaker. I think everyone is pretty confident about that.”

Compounding the impact of the DVR, the executive continued, is the movement of more content online. “On the computer right now, you get about two minutes of advertising in a 22-minute show, while on television you get about eight minutes of advertising,” he said. “When the content is moving to the digital medium, they are unable to monetize it.”

That problem will only get worse in the future, he continued, as technologies improve and viewers find ways to fast-forward through commercials online just as they do on their TVs. “The fact is this pressure is going to continue and it’s not going to disappear when we go to the Internet,” he said. He estimated that within “a couple years,” the industry will see ad-skipping capabilities online.

With all of this in mind, Baharav said the media industry needs “solutions that compensate for the loss from ad skipping and also from the audience fragmentation.”

One solution that SeamBI is pushing is dynamic product placement. The company’s technology enables companies to add or swap out different product placement advertising opportunities within a piece of programming throughout that program’s entire life cycle. For instance, if Neil Patrick Harris drives by a billboard in an original episode of “How I Met Your Mother” on CBS, SeamBI can swap out that billboard for a different ad when the episode is syndicated or when it moves online. Moreover, SeamBI can create a billboard where there was not one originally or even swap out the car that Harris is driving to reflect a more updated look and create yet another advertising opportunity.

This not only allows content owners to better monetize their syndicated content with fresh product placement advertising, but it also opens up opportunities for targeting. Signage within a show can be changed to reflect a local market, or on the Internet, products within a show can be changed based on a viewer’s tastes and habits. One viewer, for instance, might see an actor driving a Nissan Leaf while another viewer with very different tastes might see the actor driving a Hummer.

Dave Kaplan, a senior vice president of ad effectiveness for The Nielsen Co., said finding ways to do more product placement advertising and to do it better is a good idea. “We found it overall to be a really effective part of an advertisers’ marketing mix,” he said. “If you inject your brand into a program, you oftentimes are going to see higher levels of recognition for that brand as opposed to if you just placed it in a commercial pod.”

But Kaplan noted that while product placement can be an effective tool for boosting brand recognition, 30-second spots still work best in terms of moving “lower funnel branding metrics” such as purchase intent and brand consideration.

For this reason, Kaplan said product placement is most effective when it is used in tandem with the 30-second spot.

“A lot of time what we find is that product placement sort of primes the viewer to recognize the brand, notice the brand, think of the brand and it becomes more salient in their minds. Then the traditional ad comes into the mix and drives home the core message of the brand and it does it in a more packaged, potentially compelling way,” Kaplan said. “So the two together hit on all cylinders.”

Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at Horizon Media, agreed. “Where you really see a boost is when you have product placement followed by a commercial,” he told SNL Kagan. “That’s where you really have a double whammy.”

But Adgate warned that not all product placement opportunities work as well as others. “It depends on whether it’s incidental or whether it’s really strategic to the storyline,” he said.

Nielsen similarly has found that product placement works best when the advertised product is relevant to the content. “I think relevance to the content is more important than the prominence of the placement,” Kaplan said.

Overall, though, Kaplan noted that even when product placement is not done well, it generally does no harm to the brand being advertised. He explained that Nielsen on average has seen 2% of viewers say that product placement actually turns them off from a brand. “That’s been a really consistent trend that we’ve seen since 2005,” he said, “More often than not, people are generally pretty neutral about it, and then if it’s done well and it’s relevant to the content, it does a really effective job of actually raising opinion for the brand.”

Notably, the percentage of viewers who say product placement actually improves their opinion of a brand has been rising. “We’ve seen that actually grow over time pretty steadily a couple points every year,” Kaplan said. “It’s not like we’re seeing dramatic growth, but we’re seeing steady growth.” He attributed the rise to consumers becoming accustomed to product placement and advertisers getting better at it.

For his part, Baharav said his company is very careful to make sure that all of the product placement opportunities it creates make sense. “It has to be natural,” he said. “We have to satisfy the content owners and they have to feel that what we are doing is actually adding to the content.”

He continued: “If you are watching a TV show and you see something that is obviously an ad and it doesn’t make sense, it ruins the engagement that you had with the show. On the other hand, if it’s something that makes sense and you feel the connection between the character and that product, then the value to the advertiser is great and also the content owner feels OK about it. Our goal is to find those natural opportunities that bring value to everyone

Unlike examples where brands are integrated into content, SeamBI’s technology can be applied just before a show goes to air, making it more flexible than other types of brand integration. “The reason that 30-second commercials are so successful is that they are very flexible,” says Roy Baharav, SeamBI’s CEO. “Our solution is flexible and advertisers can decide at the last minute that they would like to be included.”

Moreover, SeamBI’s digital brand insertions can be incorporated into more complex brand integrations, allowing the two to work together and increasing that brand’s exposure.

Judy Kenny, executive VP of ad sales at Twentieth Television, is using SeamBI both within the shows that she sells and in an advertising vehicle that she calls “exclusive integrated pods” (EIPs). These are exclusive 60-second commercials that integrate a brand into a relevant clip from the show. How I Met Your Motherhad a segment where one of the characters was trying to stop smoking, and there’s a short, 30-second segment in which the character’s voice is raspy and deep. Twentieth pulled that segment out and turned it into pod that airs within the program. It’s sponsored by Nicorette gum, with billboards for the gum at the beginning and end of the clip.

“Nielsen research shows that if you do something creative within the pod people will keep watching all the commercials,” says Kenny. “At this point, there are plenty of places to go for integrations within the show, but we are trying to find creative ways to keep people watching the commercials.”

Some integrations require months to assemble, while others can be quick, like SeamBI. But all require brands to engage in conversations with producers, which is encouraging innovation.

“The future of advertising is adding more creative discussions to what has traditionally been an inventory discussion,” says Death. “It’s about bringing us in earlier in the process and partnering higher in the dialog to work out how we find a multiplier effect among our assets. I can do a lot more 12 months in advance than I can do 12 hours in advance.”