Too early with a ML product back in '08, people were not ready to believe such a thing was possible: basically a working VFX pipeline for what are now called "deep fakes", but I targeted inserting consumers into brand advertising TV commercials and music videos. First people simply could not grasp the concept, then they did not believe it was possible, and then because I wrote it alone and had no team VCs and partners and other potential collaborators felt working with "my company" was too risky. People want to see a team, not just one guy and an automated media pipeline. You need a team and an organization to be taken seriously, no matter how great one's technology happens to be. I did have two freelancers helping with the web site, but the entire media digital double creation and VFX pipeline was written by just me, and that is perceived as too risky. Here we are 10 years later, and still no one has done automated consumer inserting into still and video advertising. I still have my working pipeline...
It is as big if not larger than After Effects - it's an entire VFX pipeline: servers as render nodes, as compositor nodes, and so on... All extremely high speed, to the tune of 150,000 30 second clips per minute. It is/was a globally scaled on-demand VFX pipeline. Not even the VFX industry has such pipelines.
Oh, I tried all kinds of things, each with some level of success but not enough. I was offering a digital double API service to game studios, a web app for digital artists to create characters. The full pipeline was never used, just parts by various clients for customized needs.
Given that putting a potential customers face (where from?) into a video/still with a product (I'm imagining seeing a picture of me enjoying a cool bottle of cola) is more than plausible these days, why do you think it's not appeared?
Maybe consumers don't want to see themselves unsolicitly inserted into an ad?
I can easily imagine a twitterstorm over "privacy" and intrusion if adverts like that started popping up.
Or did you have a different vision/market for it? Aside from, say, novelty photos.
You pretty much got it: you enjoying a coke, driving the new car, you and your significant trading engagement rings, you in a film trailer interacting with the film's stars... The personalization can be anything from simple ads to political messaging. The trick is getting a major brand to want to do such a project. It's a completely new idea, and that requires more than a few people sticking their necks out and taking some risk. My experience has led me to believe the advertising agencies really need strong assurances to take the risk of doing personalized advertising. Consumers are used to feature film quality VFX, meaning their eyes are moderately sophisticated when looking at digital characters. The production quality required will require investment and iteration to get the personalization production pipeline correctly generating likenesses of real people that "pass" and do not look like a cheap gimmick. To date, every potential agency and production partnership I was able to begin to piece together became a no-go due to one or the other wanting to go cheap or do porn. Neither of which really work, economically or financially.
