As part of its fifth annual Demo Fest, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs showed reporters four new ad technology concepts. While not revolutionary, they demonstrate an interest by the company to both continue innovating in advertising formats, and gather data about what sorts of formats resonate with site users and which don’t.

The four products demoed:

• Microsoft Gaze: a contextual in-text widget. Embeddable script can create a pop-up widget window when site visitors hover over selected keywords. The window can host video, images, snippets of related Web pages, maps and, naturally, Microsoft advertisements.
• Search behavior-targeted gift matcher: Based on data culled from its own Live Search and opted-in user profile information from its email and Live ID (demographics, primarily), a gift search service can take an intended recipients age, gender and interests, and serve up surprising present recommendations. (If, for example, heavy Beyonce searching correlates strongly with searches on green tea, then maybe a green tea gift bag would be served up)
• Creative Creator: Allows smaller advertisers to generate display advertising using creative integration tools. Someone without a creative team or even Photoshop can put together a simple banner.
• Location search inferrer: This search technology determines if a search is likely to be intended for local search (like “doctor” or “chinese restaurants”) so that relevant local advertising and search results can be served up (as opposed to a search term like “james bond” which has no locality relevance). However, a search for “san francisco chinese restaurants” when the searcher is in Milwaukee might serve up travel-related results.

Testing contextual, search-behavior, and location-based technologies for advertising is particularly telling given Microsoft’s recent beta launch for its adCenter Publisher (pubCenter) contextual ad service, which has been gathering buzz based on its perfomance compared to AdSense among its private beta users.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.