By Ken Liebeskind
REDMOND, WA --On Feb. 5 at its Demo Fest, Microsoft unveiled a series of next generation digital advertising technologies in development at its adCenter Labs. One of them is “Contextual Ads for Video,” which will use speech recognition to dynamically serve ads based on the content discussed in the video.
A demo of the technology can be seen here.
Aaron Goldman, VP of marketing and strategy development for Resolution Media, a search engine marketing agency, says the technology will be beneficial, because “to date targeting for video has been very primitive. You target advertising based on the website or the section you buy and in some cases you can get down to geo-targeting or demo-targeting. But most ad placements haven’t been sold that way because there’s not enough inventory, so most of the buys are run of site or network.”
He compares speech recognition technology to the YouTube overlay ads, which also offer a new way to serve video ads to a segmented audience. He said speech recognition is “one of the better ways to do targeting.”
Microsoft isn’t the first company to utilize speech recognition. Blinkx and Digitalsmiths are currently using it. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO and founder of Blinkx, praised Microsoft for “developing a product that works across the web. It shows they are dedicated to display-oriented advertising with video and not just search. They recognize video is a complex media type to match to advertising.”
But Chandratillake also said the Microsoft product is insufficient because speech is “only part of the puzzle and a pretty limited way of understanding video.” Hearing words in a video can be confusing because their meaning is unclear, such as whether the words “big apple,” in a video mean a piece of fruit or New York City. Blinkx AdHoc system uses speech recognition and conceptual search technology, which analyzes the true meaning of a video, so relevant ads can be served, Chandratillake said. The conceptual search technology is based “on any information we can get from the video, based on speech and other metadata,” he said. Blinkx clients include Real Estate TV, Young Hollywood and Handmade TV.
Goldman said Microsoft contextual ad technology “is taking a step forward, compared with what’s on the mass market.” He compared speech recognition technology to the measures used to target TV ads, “where the best you can do is determine day parts and network or a particular show. You can’t get remotely into the contextual environment.”
Goldman said Microsoft’s goal for the contextual video ad technology is to utilize it in the Microsoft digital home environment, where movies, TV and other content are streamed from a computer to a digital media receiver. “It will provide the same ad opportunities to all homes for TV style advertising in a contextually relevant environment,” he said.
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