It’s one thing to cut an artful trailer or create a clever campaign to promote a show, network or brand. It’s another to put out trailer after trailer.

That’s where London-based company PromoMii wants to come in: it’s building software that will let promo producers use artificial intelligence to scan footage and create clips-based promos that require less human intervention. In the meantime, those humans can spend their time performing more creative tasks.

“When creatives hear about this, their first thought is ‘oh, this is going to take my job,’” says Michael Moss, co-founder and CEO, PromoMii. “But the machine will never wake up in the morning thinking, ‘that’s a brilliant idea, that’s what we need to do.’”

Instead, PromoMii’s software, which is still in beta, goes through hours and hours of footage and adds tags, timestamps and metadata so promo producers “don’t have to spend time watching and rewatching,” says Moss. Instead, they can use that time to create higher impact trailers.

And considering that TV is now surpassing the peak era and moving into something even bigger, there are plenty of promos to produce. Netflix alone plans to spend $18 billion next year to produce new content — that’s a lot of series and movies to market.

PromoMii’s software does two things: first, it performs the time-consuming task of cataloguing content and second, it then grabs those scenes for producers. Human intervention is still needed to add coherence, transitions, context and so forth, but just the cataloguing is a time saver.

“Producing trailers is very expensive,” Moss says — both from a cost and time perspective. “A trailer can cost you anywhere from $250 to $25,000, that’s the range creative producers tell us.“

Another advantage of PromoMii’s technology is that it can quickly identify certain actors or topics that people are most interested in and then sort through footage to pull those clips. A promo producer could then come in and apply creative, editorial and graphics and the resulting spots could be deployed digitally to very specific demographic groups across platforms.

So far, PromoMii is working with several entertainment clients on a trial basis while it hones its software’s capabilities.

“The next step is to roll this out as a commercial proposition,” says Moss. “We are in discussion with a few huge programs run by broadcasters. From there, we want spread it to new clients and keep refining it and making it better.”

For more information about producing promos for new platforms, check out Promax’s Streaming Creative track during our Deep Dive sessions on Tuesday, June 4 at Conference 2019 at the J.W. Marriott at LA Live.

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