Microsoft files patent to better target ads

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

In the previous post we tacked stock about the situation of the ads on DVR systems. As we reported one of the user-friendly solutions adopted was the possibility to watch the ad when deleting a recording. Now, like reported by the PVRblog, this attempt to solve the “problem” has gone live.

We will see how the customers and the advertisers will judge it after several weeks of usage. In the meantime the main news of the last days was the entrance in the arena of Microsoft. The Redmond company filed a patent application that tries to help advertisers. The latter in fact are losing visibility as the customers use more often than not the skip or advance button.

Actually the application filed not only gives a possible solution but also describes pretty well the actual situation. Even when viewing ads, the application says, there could be a problem with time targeted commercials that may miss their target. The same reasoning applies to geographical targeted ads. These problems could harm the advertised product sales because it may be viewed by a range of people not interested in it.

So what’s the Microsoft solution? They propose a way to correct these issues by trying to find a view to deliver the right ads to the viewer. The patent describes a system that replaces the ads with placeholders. Then when the content is viewed the placeholders are substituted with the appropriate ad.

This would solve the problem of the wrong ad at the wrong moment. Microsoft also tries to come up with a solution for the viewing issue. By using the same commercial flags adopted to add placeholders the software would also be able to recognize the ads.

In this way “optionally” it is possible to display the ad even if the user tried to skip it. This would do the worst solution to the problem though. It would force the viewer to watch the ad while one of the advantages of the DVR is the ad skipping feature. Let’s hope they find something better otherwise a new, and maybe open source, system will have to be used for digital video recording…