TechFest: Image-Centric Advertising Platform

Matthew Scott of Microsoft Research demonstrates new technology that can make advertising based on image content a reality. In existing online-advertisement platforms, the relevance between advertisers and users is decided largely by textual keyword matching. With this new technology, advertisers bid on images instead of keywords. For example, a toy seller could bid on the image of a related movie poster, while a restaurant could bid on the image of a cooking magazine cover. Users would then receive ads based on the content of images they upload or interact with if those images contain the images bid on by advertisers.