Google has taken the reigns as the contextual text advertiser of the masses. Interestingly enough, in the years since rich media has become a Web 2.0 staple, no one has really tried to get a strong foothold in the contextual video advertising market. DigitalSmiths, a company out of North Carolina might be taking a step in the right direction.

Barriers To Entry

The barriers, as always, have been technological in nature. When I did some work in the podcast search market, I had to learn a lot about the state of audio analytics. Let me just tell you that it is, at best, a burgeoning field. Transcribing rich media into a format that a machine can understand is hit or miss at best, and in order for any kind of contextual advertising model to be successful, the accuracy of these transcriptions has to be extremely high.

You wouldn’t want your ad software to think you were talking about “booze” when you were talking about “shoes” to use an example. Budwieser Ads in the middle of your children’s cartoon about Killer Clog’s From Outer Space might be inappropriate.

DigitalSmith’s product, aptly named VideoSense, uses video matching and image recognition in hopes that it will provide the type of relevance that will allow it to become the standard in rich media advertising.

Web 2.0 Roundup

According to NewTeeVee, DigitalSmith’s has recently received 6M dollars dollars in funding from the likes of Aurora Funds and Chrysalis Ventures. While it is impossible to say who will become the leader in video analytics it’s safe to conclude that the winner will need to do the following.

Provide relevance. If the analytics don’t work, advertisers won’t buy in and publishers won’t want to use it.

Keep it simple. If it takes 20 hours a week for publishers to manage their accounts, mass adoption simply will not happen.

Pay a premium. Publishers want to see returns on their advertising, especially since video publishers often provide substantially less volume than their text equivalents. If Videosense is going to be my primary mode of monetizing my video feed it better provide high levels of value.

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