“It’s hard to make traditional product placement both prominent and natural,” says MirriAd’s business development head, Calum Chace. “We can make the brand visible enough and clear enough to catch the viewers attention, but at the same time, organic”.

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The London-based company does this by a process that it refers to as “embedded advertising”, which amounts to taking a brand’s image and placing it inside a video. This could be in just about any form – examples on MirriAd’s website include posters on walls, logos on the back of t-shirts and pictures on the sides of buildings, as well as carefully placed products – but is designed to be eye-catching without being jarring.

MirriAd was created about a year ago and has raised several million pounds worth of funding from principle investor Seraphim Capital, alongside London Seed Capital, South East Growth Fund and Oxford Technology Management. Its founders were formerly involved in film post-production work and brought the technology used to embed brands in videos from their previous employment, Chace explains: “It’s a descendent of the software that created Pirates of the Caribbean”.

In terms of its business model, MirriAd keeps it simple, maintaining an online catalogue where advertisers can go to browser content and find videos that are appropriate for their brand. They can make preliminary bookings online, which are then perused and confirmed by content providers.

Aiming at large consumer and business brands, in terms of content, MirriAd’s first online focus is online TV. Music videos are an important content source to be tapped as well, says Chace, as is user-generated content in due course.

MirriAd offers the service to video content providers on other platforms too, and has already established a foothold in India’s TV and film industry, with Unilever its major client. Its first online project was a trailer for The Bourne Ultimatum, with clues for a web-based competition embedded as graffiti on walls and writing on blank sheets of paper.