It was only a matter of time, because it’s seemed obvious to many that a good video advertising solution would be for an automated system to match video content to commercial style video ads. blinkx has announced their solution called AdHoc (honestly, must every advertising solution be “Ad-something”?) that does this.
A few players, including Google themselves, have started matching contextual text ads to videos, but this is the first I’ve heard of matching TV-style commercial ads contextually to the video in an automated way.
Naturally, this leads to a big question in my mind. Will the advertiser volume be there for blinkx to make this work? In order for contextual advertising to work you need enough advertisers to cover all the possible contexts that exist in this niche world of the web. It’s the main reason why it’s been nearly impossible for any ad companies to break into contextual advertising against Google and Yahoo!. Google and Yahoo! have the advertiser volume (primarily thanks to their search results to advertise on) that draws advertisers to their platforms by the thousands.
Are there going to be enough video commercials made by advertisers in all the different topics out there for blinkx’s system to actually have a decent coverage of contextually relevant ads? Even if Google or Yahoo! was launching this system today, I’d still wonder if their huge advertiser bases would be making video commercials to make this fly.
This idea will work, but is it too early to get the necessary advertiser coverage?
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