Innovation in Contextual Video Advertising

Digitalsmiths is a company that indexes video content. They started out working for television and movie production studios that had large video libraries. They wanted to create searchable video databases to find clips for use in other media productions. Digitalsmiths built automated software that scans video in real time; recognizes famous actors, objects, brands, sounds, music, and dialogue; and maps these elements to relevant keywords. They used these keywords in proprietary search engines for the studios. But Digitalsmiths realized that their video indexing software could also be used to pull contextual ads from ad networks in the same way that Google includes relevant ads in search results or in their AdSense publisher network. You can think of Digitalsmith's software as the AdSense of video content.

Digitalsmith's innovation is bringing automated distribution of advertising into the online video marketplace in a relevant and contextual way. Let's look down the road just a little and imagine how this kind of technology could enable ABC, for example, to put more of its content online.

ABC is experimenting with delivering television via the Internet. But the way they're selling advertising online, the old way, doesn't take advantage of the Internet's possibilities. They get brands like Clorox, S.C. Johnson, and Principal Financial to back their online "broadcasts." I have no idea what these advertisers pay, but I do know that for this relationship to exist, a brand marketer and a network representative had to exchange a bunch of phone calls and emails. They probably made presentations to their bosses, signed contracts, and had many meetings to put the whole deal together. Then they had to coordinate the delivery of video assets, visuals, and voiceovers--hardly an automated process.

But suppose none of that had to happen. What if ABC instead ran the show through Digitalsmith's software? Rather than having Clorox sponsor the whole thing, they could display ads, not based on pre-negotiated deals, but automatically, based on the content of the show--maybe a travel package for a Hawaiian vacation since Lost is shot in Hawaii. Perhaps, as a result of a product placement in one of the character back-stories, the same product's ad could run during a mid-roll ad segment.   next >