Artificial Intelligence (AI) is advancing as we speak, changing the world we live in, making our lives more convenient. In a media landscape where advertisers are seeking maximum visibility for their products, TV advertising is pushing the envelope and constantly developing new forms of advertising. This week’s egtabite puts the spotlight on such an innovative solution developed by IP Deutschland: a contextual video tagging campaign, using the power of AI.

AI meets premium content in the premium environment

IP Deutschland’s Solutions Department, in close collaboration with Cologne Broadcasting Center, Info Network and RTL Interactive developed an in-house AI tool for TV advertising and successfully tested the delivery of advertising in a contextually appropriate environment. The great advantage of this newly developed AI tool is the ability to analyse content in real-time – finding the most appropriate time to feature an ad.

The first client on the German market to use this solution in a TV campaign was Rügenwalder Mühle, a family-owned business known for its processed meat and sausage specialities. As they are shifting the focus of their offering to include both vegetarian and vegan alternatives, they were looking for a creative format and were therefore the ideal candidate to pioneer this content-oriented innovation.

The main goal of the TV campaign was to promote healthier, non-meat alternatives to their audience.

The perfect dinner

The contextual video tagging campaign ran in September 2018 on the popular VOX cooking show Das perfekte Dinner (the German version of Come Dine with Me, the British show aired on Channel 4) on TVNOW platform. The cooking show was the ideal context to feature the processed-meat brand.

To display the advertisement at the appropriate time and in the right context, the show was analysed using speech recognition, followed by sentiment analysis. The software thus helped identify the keywords that are relevant for the client and that could be associated with the meat-alternative products. The client Rügenwalder Mühle approved the list of terms established by the software such as meat, burgers, sausages but also potatoes and vegetables.

The resulting metadata was used to precisely integrate the advertising message into the format context. Every time one of the keywords was mentioned in the cooking show, a dynamic L-frame ad appeared on screen for about 10 seconds, promoting healthier, vegan or vegetarian product alternatives.

Thanks to the dynamic adaptation, the selected keywords were integrated directly into the ad, allowing to diversify the featured ads and leaving no space for a repetition of a single ad. An unwanted playout in negatively associated scenes is prevented through a sentiment analysis integrated into the AI, which ensures the ad is displayed in a safe environment.

For example, when a guest on the show would mention: “Meat is my passion, I love it so much”, the tool would identify meat as a keyword and a dynamic ad would appear with the text: “Have you also tried a vegan alternative? Click here for more info on…”.

In that way, the viewer of the show would easily – with only one click – be redirected to Rügenwalder Mühle’s official website, where the latest products were being offered.

“Advertisers have long wanted to be able to play their messages individually in the video environment, which means that intelligent playout mechanisms are increasingly becoming the focus,” explains Lars-Eric Mann, Sales Director Solutions at IP Deutschland. “AI is an important building block along the way, but so far there are few empirical values, and we wanted to help with this pilot project – and we succeeded in doing that.”

Future steps

The positive results of the campaign proved the success of this innovative form of advertising, showing that contextual video tagging stimulates buying intentions. Due to the great success and turnover of the campaign, the format will be further developed and repeated in the future.

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