PromoMii: Video Ads Powered by AWS Machine Learning

Creating a movie trailer takes time, and most broadcasters and streaming platforms don't have enough resources to do it. Their creative team, responsible for putting together promotional material for digital and social media, spends very little time being creative. To produce a 30" rough edit for a 10-movie stunt is about 5 days of viewing and logging. They also use and manage external agencies, leading to bottlenecks where one department's output is heavily prioritized over another's. The whole process is onerous, time consuming, and inefficient. PromoMii, a UK startup, solves this problem with a unique blend of domain expertise and machine learning (ML). Their product Nova provides functionality to search for scenes or specific dialogues across their library. Productivity is supercharged with template queries, enabling creatives to finish their spot in minutes in terms of days. Nordic Entertainment Group, one of PromoMii's customers, found that it was 10 times cheaper and 20 times faster to create trailers with Nova. A promotion which would usually take two days to produce was completed within 2 hours. This blog post is the first in a series of startup ML stories, where we tell stories like PromoMii's in terms of three crucial ingredients to building a successful business with ML – team, product, and partnership. PromoMii was founded by two Danes from Copenhagen to help large broadcasters promote their shows. Over time and working backwards from their customers, the company pivoted toward using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enable creatives to be creative. The technological challenge inspired Tigran Mnatskanyan, CTO, to join PromoMii with a mission of building a great engineering team and crafting the content creation platform of the future. In terms of domain expertise, PromoMii's Chairman is Lester Mordue, an award-winning creative director bringing experience from MTV, Sky, Disney, and Discovery. As a creative himself, Lester immediately saw the benefits of Nova and is in a unique position to open doors for the business and provide guidance on product-market fit. "In my career, I've sat in boardrooms looking at tech and marketing ROI as well as sitting in edit suites looking for inspiration and story hooks," said Lester. "Viewers enjoy on-demand services and streaming platforms, and so too should marketeers who help make viewing decisions.