Rembrand’s CEO wants to grow virtual ad placements in streaming, and he’s looking elsewhere for models
By Michael Bürgi • December 24, 2025 •
As programmatic means of investing in channels spreads further across the media landscape, there remain a few gaps where it’s neither efficient nor even doable. One of those less developed areas is product placement and sponsorship opportunities, which are either unwieldy or downright un-buyable.
But Omar Tawakol, CEO of Rembrand, has his eye on a bigger prize — trying to improve advertising within the streaming world. Rembrand uses AI to work with both advertisers and publishers to improve the ad experience — since not everyone can comfortably afford to buy more costly ad-free access to content. Among other things, Rembrand uses uses a process called neural inverse rendering to digitally insert sponsored items into movies, shows and social media content made by millions of influencers across various platforms — rather than manually entering them. That automated process lends itself to investment through programmatic means.
A veteran of multiple ad-tech and audience data firms, from Oracle to BlueKai to Cisco to PlaceIQ, Tawakol also sits on the board of The Trade Desk, having also served on LiveRamp’s board until September of this year. Tawakol shared his thoughts about trends to expect in 2026 and how Rembrand fits into them.
The conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
What trends do you foresee in 2026?
The first trend that we really tend to focus on when we built this business is that, over the past 10 years, there has been this massive flip in behavior. Ten years ago, when people watched video, 80% of the time was in high ad load environments, approximately 17 minutes an hour, which is like torture, right? And only 20% was in low ad load environments of five minutes on average. Fast forward 10 years and it literally flipped.
People literally pay to avoid ad interruptions, and so our whole mission has been to say, what if you could democratize that good experience and keep it in a low ad load but still make money? The old way of thinking through sponsorships didn’t scale well for you to be able to make that change. People are figuring out how to treat things more like a media model, so that you can scalably sell placements inside of shows without all the friction that you got with traditional sponsorships.
What’s a good example of that?
We’ve looked across 10 different countries. Asia, South Africa and the Middle East are way ahead of the U.S. here. Even though the tech is behind — they’re using VFX to do this — the volume of placements inside of TV shows in those markets is 10 X what it is in the U.S. Instead of putting too many products in scenes, they put billboards — we call it virtual out of home — inside of transition scenes. (Imagine you have a scene in a drama and when you show that the scene ended, you go to a beautiful view of the city you’re in.) And what you do in that scene is put this massive billboard that looks like it’s naturally there, but it just happens not to be.
The reason that ended up being the scalable media model is, No. 1, there are no actors in the shot, so the director doesn’t debate whether it belongs there or not. And No. 2, there is no contextual match needed — if you have a Toyota billboard or a Pepsi billboard, it doesn’t impact the storyline.
In some of these markets, the biggest advertisers are spending 10% of their entire TV ad budget on this tactic. What we’re trying to do is become the software underpinning for those markets. But we’re also bringing some of those techniques to the U.S. that’s very different than a classic sponsorship model, where you’re negotiating whether the Pepsi is being held by the actor in the scene, or whether the actor would actually indeed be drinking Pepsi or beer or champagne. Those models tend to be high friction. This model is much more like a simple media model.
How will brands take advantage of that?
The media model is first solving, essentially, a substitute for GRPs, which is unskippable reach in a beautiful, contextual environment where it’s a large portion of the screen. You actually put in a message. For example, when you put in a can, it’s just the can. But when you put a message that says, “Sprite, now with cherry,” brands can get new news out via the message, whereas they’re not 100% sure what they get when they just put the can there. It’s basically virtual out of home.
It’s a category that we already are seeing a large scale outside of the U.S., but we believe that media model will work well here in programmatic.
You just mentioned programmatic. How does that fit in?
We do think the programmatic opportunity is very interesting, because now we can put one billboard for one audience, one for another. We think we can change the economics of streaming if we give streamers this option of making money without increasing ad load. That’s the entire mission of the business. It’s leveraging the fact that consumers really want this so much so that they pay to avoid ads. We don’t have to generate demand — this is a trend that’s ongoing. What we do need to do is find a scalable model that produces that motion, not take a high friction model and try to scale a high friction model.
This quarter, we saw that 96% of our product insertions were outdoor virtual billboards, so we’re already seeing this in the ‘States. We just need to now educate the whole market and scale it.
