Grabbing the attention of a viewing audience is more difficult than ever when that audience is in a state of constant online and offline distraction. This same audience has also become increasingly desensitised to traditional advertising. Avoiding ads - by looking away or skipping content - represented an estimated $74Bn loss of advertising value in 2013 alone. Integrating advertising into content that audiences love is the solution, and Mirriad now makes this easy and scalable for broadcast and digital.

Mirriad's spent the last five years developing a technology platform that disrupts barriers between content and advertising. It brings top brands and high quality content together; seamlessly integrating products, signage, video into produced video content. It also offers contextual brand engagement via second screen (mobile or tablet etc.).

Mirriad’s multi-million dollar Native-In-Video-Advertising (NIVA) platform ensures transparency, contextual authenticity and integrity in-line with international regulatory standards where applicable.

Its computer vision technology was developed by a world-class team of five PhD scientists and it won an Academy Award for technical achievement in 2013. The availability of very high power processors called ‘Graphics Processors’ as used in the real-time rendering of computer games and Cloud computing is a fundamental enabler of Mirriad’s scalability.

Mirriad’s NIVA platform is designed to recover some of the lost value for advertisers by ensuring the ad is in the most popular content viewed by target audiences. Mirriad’s ads are non-intrusive yet impactful, immersive, contextually relevant and targeted. Viewer engagement is increased through second screen activation the moment a brand appears on screen.

Using a range of industry-standard interfaces, Mirriad’s platform slots into the evolving universe of interconnected advertising platforms and perfectly complements other forms of advertising.

Although its conceptual roots can be found in traditional product placement, it has transformed that approach beyond recognition, opening up a new, cost-effective and immensely powerful source of ad inventory that can be media-planned with standard advertising reach and frequency goals.

Wholly developed by Mirriad, the patent-pending platform uses advanced software including feature tracking and detection, region segmentation, optical flow, image recognition, 3D and planar tracking. It operates in a way that could be compared to the technology being used in Google’s driverless cars where computers need to understand the environment around them.

Mirriad creates media packages for certain brands or categories according to context. This information is coupled to metadata capturing information about audiences, views, geography and budget/investment; and then presented as inventory or matched to an agency RFP. Mirriad removes the burden of approvals by managing the content rights. Ads can be remotely previewed and approved on any device, anywhere in the world.

Once approved, Mirriad builds the campaign, with analytics and metrics keeping track of performance and goals. Mirriad is working with the IAB to standardise NIVA ad units.

Mirriad operates on a global scale and its ads carry across all viewing platforms (television, desktops, games consoles, tablets and mobile devices.)

-Mirriad controls the technology stack. Wholly proprietary.

-The next stage of development/roll out is a global launch of Marketplace to key stakeholders such as media-buying agencies.

-Growth has been fueled by a series of investments from financial institutions and strategic investors around the world.

-Mirriad plans to maintain its technology lead. It will continue to enhance the scalability and ease-of-use of the platform, and provide advertising agencies with a high margin, offer brands with better value for money, and content owners with a new incremental revenue stream. Its ‘Marketplace’ concept, focusing on audiences rather than ‘one-product-one-show’, will further boost fluidity.

-Mirriad believes that NIVA benefits all parties: brands, content providers, broadcasters, distributors and consumers. People want to watch and engage with great content; they don’t want to be disturbed by ads. Reduced returns for traditional advertising ultimately diminishes funds for content, affecting everyone from broadcasters to the new MCNs. Mirriad helps to reverse this trend by placing measurable ad units within the content itself.

-Mirriad operates globally, working with name brands (i.e. Intel, Pepsi, McDonalds, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Fiat), international content owners and distributors (i.e. UMG, VEVO, HULU, Fox, Sony Pictures, RTL and Zee) to reach audiences of billions worldwide. Nielsen reviews show that use of NIVA (including Mirriad’s) results in a 62% consumer recall, a 15% rise in brand opinion and a 16% increase in propensity to buy. Powerful results have been observed when used with second screen activation apps and Twitter.