What might happen when China's largest online-retail company and the country's equivalent of YouTube Inc team up? One possibility: an extreme form of product placement that encourages viewers to buy whatever their favorite movie star is wearing.

Chinese Web video company Youku Tudou Inc may develop technology that can recognize clothing, furniture and other products in a video and deliver pop-up ads with links to buy the items on an Alibaba Group Holding Ltd store, Victor Koo, the chief executive officer, said in a recent interview. He said the ads may resemble the floating text and links that sometimes appear within YouTube clips. Those annotations are added manually by the video's creator.

Getting bombarded by pop-ups in the middle of Star-Lord battling aliens in Guardians of the Galaxy could get really annoying, but the ads have serious potential to be effective. Digital advertising in China has some growing up to do.