Microsoft offered its version of the future of online advertising this week at its third annual Demo Fest, a two-day gathering at Microsoft’s Redmond campus.

The event focused on showcasing the digital advertising tools developed in Microsoft’s adCenter Labs. The tools represent nearly 60 technologies at various stages of development, including keyword technologies, consumer orientation technologies, video display technologies and many others.

“The technologies showcased at Demo Fest will help create unprecedented opportunity for developers and search engine marketers like the Keyword Services Platform,” said Tarek Najm, engineer and general manager of Microsoft adCenter at Microsoft. “KSP is a service that provides a framework for researchers to plug in advanced algorithms in the form of building blocks to be consumed by developers for building sophisticated advertiser applications.”

Below is a sample of the new adCenter Labs technologies that can help provide a good advertising experience for users, advertisers and developers.

Keyword Technologies
Keyword technology plays a vital role in paid search and contextual ads by allowing advertisers to reach consumers interested in their products and services based on the terms entered into a search query box.

Commercial Intent Detection: This advanced keyword analysis tool helps differentiate consumers ready to purchase online from consumers searching for information about products or performing other tasks. The tool provides a probability score indicating the likelihood that a keyword or phrase is part of a search with commercial intent. This can be used to track user progress through the conversion funnel, or to determine that the user is not looking to buy.

Query Entity Detection: This technology detects the best way to break down a multiword query. For instance, if a user searches for “real estate agent,” this tool can tell that “real estate” is one phrase and “agent” is another. This tool helps determine the meaning of a query term, improving the relevance of search results.

Keyword Services Platform: This will enable developers to build more intelligent applications for online advertising. It provides a set of web service APIs related to keyword technologies such as keyword recommendation, forecasting, categorization and monetization. To quote James Colborn, product manager for adCenter Labs, “We’re making it an open network by publishing and sharing the algorithm. We’re excited to see how our partners will build on the KSP.”

Contextual Advertising: This technology classifies web sites and keywords into a hierarchical taxonomy. This helps increase the relevance of contextual ads by ensuring the categories of publisher sites are relevant to advertisers’ products and services.

Consumer Orientation Technologies

When placing online ads, marketers must consider the idiosyncrasies of different consumers audiences.

Sensitive Content Detection: This technology can help detect when web pages contain content considered objectionable by the general public, such as pornography, crime or terrorism.

Large Display Feedback: This vision-based technology creates interactive public displays that can measure audience size, track audience gestures and estimate demographics.

Content Classification: This technology will help increase the probability that ads displayed during web searches are relevant to consumer queries. The technology does this by accurately analyzing and matching the web pages included in search results.

Video Display Technologies

Online video gives advertisers a powerful medium to connect with consumers, particularly when the video includes interactive and other advanced technology.

Social Video Sharing: This tool allows users to highlight and comment on information within a specific area of a video frame. This allows users to participate in meaningful, social interactions on specific topics within the video. Users can discuss how the umpire just made a bad call on a pitch, or ask questions about a step in baking instructions.

Video Hyperlinks: This stand-alone tool allows marketers to embed video hyperlinks within online video ads. The hyperlinks can be associated with specific products in the video, leading consumers to web sites where they can get additional information or purchase products.

Search marketers have using Microsoft adCenter for a few months now and are generally satisfied with its targeting capabilities. The major shortcoming is traffic volume, due to ads displayed on limited inventory. ContentAds is expected to help expand inventory.

You can view the Press Release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/msn/factsheet/adCenterBreakthroughsFS.mspx