The future of digital advertising? It's social video sharing, standing around waving at billboards, and separating buyers from time-wasters online. Maybe. At least, that's one of the new technologies on view at Microsoft's Demo Fest, where the company's adCenter Labs division is showing off its latest concepts.
Social video sharing lets users highlight and comment on a specific area of a video frame, using Javascript, while also tying in with users' Windows Live ID if they only want to view comments from their friends. I'm slightly unclear about how this helps advertisers, but do like Microsoft's example of "being able to discuss how a goalie just blocked a soccer goal". Love that soccerball...
Large Display Feedback is one of the more esoteric ones, which involves interactive public displays that passers by can control, via a computer-vision algorithm that tracks their hand movements. But the screens will also include face-detection and machine-learning algorithms, allowing them to count the number of people in the audience, and predict whether they're male or female.
Finally, there's the slightly more prosaic (but probably more immediately useful from advertisers' points of view) Commercial Intent Detection technology, which is an algorithm that analyses what people type into a search engine, and generates a score showing how likely they are to actually buy something, as opposed to just browse. Apparently 'LCD monitor' scores a commercial intention of 0.74 out of 1.0.
Click here for a full rundown and demos of the technologies, including others like video hyperlinks, query intent detection and contextual advertising.