Thursday, January 18, 2007
Microsoft Touts Interactive Ads
Microsoft is developing technology to make online and large video screen ads interactive. The company introduced a tool for advertisers to develop in-video hyperlinks so that products can be highlighted and clicked on for more information.It may take a while for people to get used to interacting with ads, so there needs to be some education involved. Advertisers will have to accent the videos (perhaps pausing the content to make it easy to click) until consumers get the idea. Online is a better bet than TV to succeed at interactivity.
Microsoft also is working on technology to add comments within videos, which may have some application for advertisers. The "social video sharing" encourages forwarding videos with comments attached to make viral videos even more interesting. Users would be able to choose whether to view comments from the public or a private group.
This could be an effective method of tracking responses to advertisements as long as some filtering capabilities are included to weed out the profanity and rubbish that some people will feel compelled to offer.
Microsoft is also working on an adSense competitor, and is releasing APIs so that advertisers can access demographic and performance data to better manager their keywords.
The video display technology would enable people to interact with a screen through hand gestures. Theoretically video billboards would watch to see what people actions and respond differently depending on what they do. An interesting idea that is probably years away.
From a resource standpoint there is no reason why Microsoft can't stay at least on par with Google in search and advertising technology. For now public opinion is with Google, which will be hard to change even if MS would pull ahead. Having a better solution for advertisers doesn't matter if you don't have an audience.
Posted By Jason Dowdell at 01:03 PM
Permanent Link: Microsoft Touts Interactive Ads
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