Product Placement in How I Met Your Mother Reruns

With the advent of the DVR, studios and networks have been searching for more and more ways to generate more revenue. One of the most annoying ways (for viewers) they’ve done this is via product placement. Now they are taking it a step further. The studios are monetizing reruns.

There were a couple of posts on social news site Reddit where they pointed out product placement added to reruns of the hit comedy How I Met Your Mother.

In the images below you can see digitally added product placements for the movies The Zookeeper and Country Strong. Take a look at the screen captures below (click for full image).

Update: More product placements have been found, this time for the movie Bad Teacher. From EW:

Turns out that 20th Century Fox Television — the studio behind Mother — has been selling promotional spots in syndicated episodes to wring even more money out of the sitcom’s already rich syndication deals. Specifically, the feat is accomplished by a partnership with a company, SeamBI, which stands for Seamless Brand Integration and is responsible for digitally altering old episodes with new products and brands.

The company’s CEO Roy Baharav calls SeamBI an “advertising technology innovator” and says that what they do — in essence, monetizing aging television shows by adding new brands and product placement into old episodes — is the future. “What we do is we insert, very efficiently, brands into content in a natural way and in a way that is valuable to advertisers,” Baharav says. “So we find the balance between not compromising the integrity of the content and, on the other end, bring a lot of value to the advertiser.”