Contextual Internet Multimedia Advertising

The advent of media-sharing sites has led to the unprecedented Internet delivery of community-contributed media like images and videos. Those visual contents have become the primary sources for online advertising. Conventional advertising treats multimedia advertising as general text advertising by displaying advertisements either relevant to the queries or the Web pages, without considering the potential advantages which could be brought by media contents. In this paper, we summarize the trend of Internet multimedia advertising and conduct a broad survey on the methodologies for advertising which are driven by the rich contents of images and videos. We discuss three key problems in a generic multimedia advertising framework. These problems are: contextual relevance that determines the selection of relevant advertisements, contextual intrusiveness which is the key to detect appropriate ad insertion positions within an image or video, and insertion optimization that achieves the best association between the advertisements and insertion positions so that the effectiveness of advertising can be maximized in terms of both contextual relevance and contextual intrusiveness. We show recently developed MediaSense which consists of image, video, and game advertising as an exemplary application of contextual multimedia advertising. In the MediaSense, the most contextually relevant ads are embedded at the most appropriate positions within images or videos. To this end, techniques in computer vision, multimedia retrieval, and computer human interaction are leveraged. We also envision that the next trend of multimedia advertising would be game-like advertising which is more impressionative and thus can promote advertising in an interactive, as well as more compelling and effective way. We conclude this survey with a brief outlook on open research directions.