Computational advertising seeks to place the best ad in the best context before the right customer.
THe rapIdly CHangIng tisements that appear on Web pages are often chosen by sophisticated algorithms that match ad keywords to
adver-
words on a Web page. Take the Chevy ad, for example, that frequently appears on your favorite news site. A real-time ad network at one of the major search engines—Google, MSN, and Yahoo!—might place it on a page of automotive news. But what if the news page’s featured article is about a tragic accident caused by a mechanical failure in a Chevy SUV? That’s not a page General Motors wants to be associated with, let alone pay good money to advertise on.
Costly mishaps like this could be avoided by a new discipline called computational advertising, which seeks to put the best ad in the best context before the right customer. It draws from numerous fields, including information retrieval, machine learning, natural-language processing, microeconomics, and game theory, and tries to match ads with a variety of user scenarios, such as querying a search engine, reading a Web page, watching a video on YouTube, or instant messaging a friend.
Computational advertising could spur the Web’s growth as a medium of mass customization. Better ad matching could quicken the trend toward personalization, making highly specialized magazines, Web sites, and TV channels more financially viable. “ Advertising has been the engine that has powered the huge development of the Web,” says Andrei Broder, fellow and vice president for computational advertising at Yahoo! Research. “ Without advertising, you would not have blogs and search engines.”
Computational advertising is a type of automation that tries to replicate what humans might do if they had the time to read Web pages to discern their content and find relevant
andrei Broder, vice president for computational advertising at Yahoo! Research, presenting a tutorial on Web search and advertising at the 30th annual international acm SiGiR conference in amsterdam.
ads among the millions available. “In the old world of advertising, they deal with few choices and large amounts of money for each choice,” Broder says. “We deal with maybe a hundred million potential ads, each worth a fraction of a cent.”
a Perfect match
There are basically three kinds of Web ads. Sponsored search ads are matched to the results of search engine queries; banner ads target particular demographics and venues, typically without regard to a page’s content; and contextual advertising, also called context match, applies to other types of Web pages, such as the home page of a financial news site. Computational advertising addresses all three types of ads.
Google, MSN, and Yahoo! use electronic auctions to assign ads to their own results pages and the pages of other Web sites. “Google is a yenta,” or matchmaker, says Google chief econo-
mist Hal Varian. “The goal is to get a perfect match.”
In sponsored search, advertisers bid to place ads that contain keywords correlated to words in a user’s search string. For contextual advertising, the keywords are related to words on the entire page, and the search engine’s advertising service places the ads. For banner ads, online ad networks place ads on sites whose topics and audiences match the advertiser’s criteria.
Before the advent of computational advertising, ad engines could make mistakes more simple-minded than the Chevy SUV scenario. Suppose, for example, a news page contains the word “flowers.” If the article isn’t about flowers but instead revisits the Rolling Stones’ underrated 1967 record Flowers, the reader is unlikely to want ads from florists. The old method of analyzing co-occurring words and phrases doesn’t help much, and neither does frequency. “You could extract a word used many times in the ar-
photograph by nir nussbaum
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