I recently tried using Midjourney to make a picture of two walkers. I liked the pilot-frame sunglasses that one of them was wearing.
The next day or two, I went to Costco and saw a pair of Hugo Boss sunglasses on a special rack that looked just like the ones on the AI hikers. They were really cheap. To get what was on my shopping list, I took them off and tried them on. Then I looked at myself in the mirror.
I went back and bought them a short time later. They gave me a good deal on new sunglasses, and they got my money. Win-win?
Product placement
Product placement isn’t a new way to sell something. Since radio was the main form of entertainment, businesses have paid celebrities to use their goods. It’s not always visible or smooth; sometimes it’s very clear.
Product placement in pictures made by AI is either a dream or a nightmare for me, but it is also a chance.
Trade-offs
At the moment, a lot of AI picture generators cost money to use. It makes sense—the technology and the servers they use are not cheap.
When will a service work with a business to give them a discount in return for something? As soon as possible. It’s possible that you can get the tool for free or a low price if you agree to have people or things in the pictures you make wear hats with a company’s name on them.
The user can click or tap on the hat at some point during the process of making the picture. This will take them to the sponsor’s website. These kinds of efforts will definitely get help from people who work in martech.
I’m not sure if that’s what I would want most of the time, but the lower price for subscriptions does look good.
How SEO is like
If you use SEO, you should use a more subtle way to place products, which sounds more interesting.
Also, it doesn’t seem unlikely that people will (or already are?) plan how to make certain pictures stand out in the huge amounts of data that AI models use to make images. Instead of focused on search terms, the focus would be on the words in the prompt.
Consider a company that makes sunglasses. What if an AI service relied on pictures of those sunglasses to make pictures? This is not a clear case of product placement; it is much more subtle.
This is where the latest thing I did would fit. I have no idea what brand or model of sunglasses the walker made by AI was wearing—it was all made up, after all. But they looked great and were a good match for the Hugo Boss shoes that Costco had on display when I arrived.
Of course, AI doesn’t always do a good job of showing things. AI tools, for example, make human hands look very different. It’s also possible that the goods will be shown with a picture of someone doing something violent or otherwise controversial. It will be hard to keep your brand safe around this.
Product designers, lawyers who handle intellectual property, and people in charge of a company’s image may worry that AI tools will hallucinate and mess up what a product looks like. But people who use AI tools will tell them to make pictures of their goods, even if they don’t like them.
Here’s where steps like SEO will come in handy. There will be experts who give advice on how to organize image metadata, use HTML tags for widely available images, set up and make datasets available in DAMs, and other things.
It’s possible that AI platforms will make money off of their data by, for example, letting people see what words people use in prompts. Then the owners of the picture assets can make their metadata and catalogs better. Let’s also take a moment to think about the people who work in statistics. How would they figure out who did this?
Image searches
We can definitely go one step further with this. For example, Microsoft Bing and Google both have tools that let people look for something specific in an image. Someone might want to buy something after seeing a picture of a famous person. They can use that picture search to find that item or a “dupe,” which is what cool kids call a fake these days.
What would you do as a martech expert at a clothing company to make sure that your product pages and pictures show up in these kinds of image search results?
I’ve tried this with pictures made by AI. Even though the sunglasses I saw were made up by AI, Google Lens shows hits for things that look like the ones I saw. This is one more way for AI services to make money off of their data.
Fantasy or nightmare
I don’t want this kind of future, but does anyone doubt that all of this is possible?
No matter how they play out, these options are important to think about. The fact that product placement is possible shows how important it is to have a martech plan. So, it’s a good reminder that we should all try to organize and handle data and assets in a way that makes them easy for people and computers to find and understand.