News & Events |
The latest happenings at Microsoft AdCenter Labs,
in the fields of Audience Intelligence, Data Mining, Keyword Research
Direct Marketing, Contextual Advertising, and Video Mining |
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ADKDD, August 24, 2008
The goal of this workshop is to not only increase communication among researchers working on seemingly different pieces of the advertisement pie, but also to encourage data mining researchers to bring new ideas from related areas to solve the numerous challenges faced by the rapidly changing digital advertising industry. We want to bring together auction theorists, social network researchers, natural language researchers, information retrieval experts, audience understanding researchers, television advertisement analysts and many others, to promote a fruitful exchange of ideas to advance the field.
For details, please visit http://adlab.microsoft.com/adkdd2008 |
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KDD, August 24-27, 2008
The annual ACM SIGKDD conference is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences. KDD-08 will feature keynote presentations, oral paper presentations, poster sessions, workshops, tutorials, panels, exhibits, demonstrations, and the KDD Cup competition.
Microsoft adCenter Labs is proud to be a platinum sponsor of KDD08.
For details, please visit http://www.kdd2008.com/ |
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Microsoft Announces Acquisition of YaData
Feb. 27, 2008 - Microsoft today announced an agreement to acquire YaData Ltd., a provider of advanced tools for the discovery of unique customer segments. YaData's technology will enable Microsoft to provide its advertisers with richer targeting capabilities so they can connect with their audience in more efficient and engaging ways, at the same time providing its customers more relevant and focused ads. The YaData team will join Microsoft's Israel R&D center in Herzliya and YaData's solutions will be deployed through Microsoft's Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group. More about YaData.
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Microsoft adCenter Labs Unveils Digital Advertising Innovations at Fourth Annual Demo Fest
Team demonstrates progress of existing marketing tools to help digital advertising become more efficient and relevant.
REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 5, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a series of next-generation digital advertising technologies at its fourth annual Demo Fest, an event that showcases some of the leading-edge technologies in development by Microsoft adCenter Labs (http://adlab.microsoft.com). The technologies highlighted at this event included the latest advances and algorithms in content analysis and computer vision for video and images, speech recognition for contextual video ads, and advanced marketing intelligence that enable enhanced audience insight and better targeting capabilities for advertisers. "We believe the technical advances and intelligence we are creating at adCenter Labs can change the game of online advertising," said Tarek Najm, technical fellow at Microsoft. "Solutions to today's challenges must be capable of handling and understanding the complexity of vast amounts of data. To address that challenge, we are developing advertising algorithms that can anticipate and understand consumer behavior faster than the speed of thought, so that we can help advertisers create more efficient and relevant user experiences."
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The following seven demos were shown at today's event:
• Air Wave. This technology creates a "fourth screen" experience beyond the TV, PC and mobile phone to enable advertisers to engage consumers outside of the home in public places such as an airport or a shopping mall. By using an interactive, multitouch screen display, consumers can play games or interact with advertisements to receive coupons or product information. With the help of a webcam, they can try on products such as sunglasses virtually. This technology builds on the "large display ads" technology showcased at last year's Demo Fest.
• Contextual Ads for Video. Through speech recognition, this technology enables ads to be dynamically served based on the content discussed in the video. For example, if the topic of the video was gardening, ads related to gardening or lawn improvement could be served in an adjacent text-based ad as the video played. For advertisers, this provides access to consumers while at the point of consideration.
• Intelligent Bug Ads. This technology balances the interests of advertisers and the target audience by locating nonintrusive frames in a video in which to place ads. By using a computer vision algorithm to calculate the least intrusive spot in the video, it approximates human judgment and places the ad in the video where it is least likely to interfere with the consumer's viewing experience.
• Visual Product Browsing. This tool uses computer vision algorithms to browse and categorize images as a human might, without the need for manual data tagging. Online shoppers could use this technology to visually browse categorized images of products such as lamps and narrow their search to find "more like this" options through physical and visual characteristics such as the product's height, depth and width. This brings efficiency to photo browsing and enhanced targeting capabilities for advertisers who are trying to better understand user intent and preferences.
• Content Analysis Engine. This technology uses advanced algorithms to automatically extract and categorize information from search queries and Web page contents to better understand user intent and minimize search engine marketing complexity. Search engine marketers can use this technology to discover valuable keywords relevant to their category or to bid on categories, such as digital cameras, instead of managing each individual keyword associated with a category. Categorization also helps publishers more effectively monetize their advertising inventory by opening up additional contextual content opportunities deeper into their content pages.
• Content Detection in Sub-documents. This technology identifies sensitive or unsuitable content such as pornography, weapons or negative sentiments that advertisers would not likely want to be associated with, and automatically blocks contextual ads related to that content. Microsoft is building on "whole-page content detection," shown at last year's Demo Fest, to respect users' sensitivities and advertisers' brands and images. This year the adCenter Labs team took it one step further by analyzing individual sections of a complex Web page, such as the MSN home page, and only serving contextual ads that relate to nonsensitive content.
• Ad Research Dashboard. The dashboard builds on the success of the Keyword Services Platform (KSP) introduced at Demo Fest last year. It is a flexible and central place within adCenter that provides marketers with access to analytics and advanced algorithms that are tied to actual data sets from adCenter to help them maximize the effectiveness of their search marketing campaigns. The dashboard builds on Microsoft's commitment to provide advertisers and agencies with as much data transparency as possible to help them to make more informed decisions about their search marketing campaigns.
"The ultimate marketing objective is to find a sweet spot where you connect with a consumer on their terms," said Jeffrey Pruitt, executive vice president of Corporate Partnerships for iCrossing and president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). "The insights and research that are coming out of Microsoft's adCenter Labs help provide agencies and advertisers with smarter, more relevant online advertising technologies and tools to make informed decisions on those connection points.” |
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Microsoft Shows Off AdCenter, January 23, 2007
Search Engine Watch, Jan 23, 2007
Quote: Microsoft last week invited its top advertisers to Redmond to dazzle them with the latest and greatest bits of its adCenter advertising platform and emerging projects from its adCenter Labs (adLabs) testing grounds.
For details, please visit Microsoft Shows Off AdCenter |
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Microsoft adCenter Labs 3rd Annual DemoFest, January 18, 2007
On Thursday, January 18, 2007 Microsoft adCenter welcomed colleagues to test drive more than 35 new and improved online advertising technologies during our third annual DemoFest.
Researchers were excited to show off tools such as interactive video, social networking, sensitive content detection, geographic location detection, entity analysis and many more. This day-long event provided a great opportunity to test drive our new algorithms and technologies and also shared valuable feedback with adLabs teams. |
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Microsoft Unveils New adCenter APIs, Targeting Features, January 18, 2007
MediaPost, Jan 18th, 2007
Quote: Microsoft Wednesday previewed a new adCenter feature that will allow search engine marketers access to MSN data that can be used to predict demographic behavior, traffic, and how keywords will perform.
For details, please visit Microsoft Unveils New adCenter APIs, Targeting Features |
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Microsoft Prototype Targets ads Based on Viewer's Gender, January 18, 2007
Seattle PI, Jan 18th, 2007
Quote: Engineers at Microsoft Corp. have developed a prototype advertising system that uses a small video camera and facial-recognition software to try to determine a viewer's gender and select an appropriate ad to display.
For details, please visit Microsoft Prototype Targets ads Based on Viewer's Gender |
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CEO Steve Ballmer announces the launch of Microsoft adCenter in the U.S., May 03, 2006
At the seventh annual MSN® Strategic Account Summit, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer announced the launch of Microsoft adCenter, the company’s online advertising platform now serving 100 percent of paid search traffic on Microsoft® online properties in the U.S. market.
For details, please visit CEO Steve Ballmer announces the launch of Microsoft adCenter in the U.S. |
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adCenter Labs Announcement, January 12, 2006
On Thursday Jan 12, 2006 Microsoft adCenter proudly announced launch of Microsoft adCenter Labs and showcased 30 latest online advertising techniques. Microsoft adCenter Labs will be an exposition of industry-leading research and innovation in the field of digital advertising technology from Microsoft researchers.
For details, please visit adCenter Labs Announcement |
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Launches Paid-Search Service in France and Singapore, September 26, 2005
Today, Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the MSN® Information Services & Merchant Platform division, opened the second annual Advertising Week 2005 in New York City by announcing the official launch of adCenter in France and Singapore. adCenter powers a paid-search service from MSN that provides advanced audience intelligence and targeting capabilities to help advertisers improve their return on investment when it comes to paid-search advertising. The official launch of adCenter in France today and Singapore on Aug. 31 follows successful pilot programs in both countries. U.S. testing of adCenter is set to begin in October. "adCenter is helping us apply more flexibility and control in our paid-search advertising campaigns because it gives us the tools to learn so much more about the kind of people who are searching on MSN," said Stuart Larkins, vice president of Search for Performics Inc., a division of DoubleClick Inc., which participated in the test.
For details, please visit Launches Paid-Search Service in France and Singapore |
