AI Contextual Advertising: A New Era for Viewer-Centric Ads
Video has become the dominant medium for entertainment and information so effective advertising strategies have never been more important. This is exacerbated by Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies for Chrome which is now expected to happen in early 2025. For over 20 years cookies have been the backbone for targeted advertising campaigns and their potential removal requires new solutions that can deliver relevant ads while respecting user privacy.
Bitmovin’s AI Contextual Advertising addresses this problem. By analyzing the video, audio, and text data during encoding and passing this information to the video player, this technology enables ad servers to deliver highly relevant and targeted ads based on what’s being watched. Unlike traditional cookie-based methods, it integrates seamlessly into the viewing experience without relying on personal user data so it’s both privacy-friendly and highly effective. While advertising is the primary use case we’ll explore, this technology has the potential for a wide range of applications, which we’ll touch on later.
In this blog, we’ll dive into the technical implementation of AI Contextual Advertising, from its origins in a Bitmovin hackathon to the real-world engineering challenges we overcame to bring this latest feature to life.
