New Cool Tools from adCenter Labs DemoFest

I was at the 4th Annual Demo Fest here in Redmond hosted by the guys from Microsoft adLab.

As I’m writing a series of posts on the adCenter Blog, I had trotted along to see what was new and was not dissapointed!

From today’s press release here’s a selection of the kind of innovative tools they’re working on:

• Air Wave – This technology creates a “fourth screen” experience beyond the TV, PC and mobile phone to enable advertisers to engage consumers outside of the home in public places such as an airport or a shopping mall. By using an interactive, multitouch screen display, consumers can play games or interact with advertisements to receive coupons or product information. With the help of a webcam, they can try on products such as sunglasses virtually. This technology builds on the “large display ads” technology showcased at last year’s Demo Fest.
• Contextual Ads for Video – Through speech recognition, this technology enables ads to be dynamically served based on the content discussed in the video. For example, if the topic of the video was gardening, ads related to gardening or lawn improvement could be served in an adjacent text-based ad as the video played. For advertisers, this provides access to consumers while at the point of consideration.
• Intelligent Bug Ads – This technology balances the interests of advertisers and the target audience by locating nonintrusive frames in a video in which to place ads. By using a computer vision algorithm to calculate the least intrusive spot in the video, it approximates human judgment and places the ad in the video where it is least likely to interfere with the consumer’s viewing experience. 
• Visual Product Browsing – This tool uses computer vision algorithms to browse and categorize images as a human might, without the need for manual data tagging. Online shoppers could use this technology to visually browse categorized images of products such as lamps and narrow their search to find “more like this” options through physical and visual characteristics such as the product’s height, depth and width. This brings efficiency to photo browsing and enhanced targeting capabilities for advertisers who are trying to better understand user intent and preferences. 
• Content Analysis Engine – This technology uses advanced algorithms to automatically extract and categorize information from search queries and Web page contents to better understand user intent and minimize search engine marketing complexity. Search engine marketers can use this technology to discover valuable keywords relevant to their category or to bid on categories, such as digital cameras, instead of managing each individual keyword associated with a category. Categorization also helps publishers more effectively monetize their advertising inventory by opening up additional contextual content opportunities deeper into their content pages.
• Content Detection in Sub-documents –This technology identifies sensitive or unsuitable content such as pornography, weapons or negative sentiments that advertisers would not likely want to be associated with, and automatically blocks contextual ads related to that content. Microsoft is building on “whole-page content detection,” shown at last year’s Demo Fest, to respect users’ sensitivities and advertisers’ brands and images. This year the adCenter Labs team took it one step further by analyzing individual sections of a complex Web page, such as the MSN home page, and only serving contextual ads that relate to nonsensitive content. 
• Ad Research Dashboard – The dashboard builds on the success of the Keyword Services Platform (KSP) introduced at Demo Fest last year. It is a flexible and central place within adCenter that provides marketers with access to analytics and advanced algorithms that are tied to actual data sets from adCenter to help them maximize the effectiveness of their search marketing campaigns. The dashboard builds on Microsoft’s commitment to provide advertisers and agencies with as much data transparency as possible to help them to make more informed decisions about their search marketing campaigns.