Intelligent Delivery of Interactive Advertisement Contents

Content networking provides a potential solution for advertising applications. Bell-labs Research China (BLRC) is conducting a project named "interactive multimedia advertising", which aims at an advertisement system to enhance the interactive ability between customers and advertisers. Rich communication methods (including VoIP, SMS, MMS and Email) are introduced to allow customers to set up their interactions with advertisers easily by just several mouse clicks. Moreover, the system provides an extensible infrastructure for dealing with varieties of advertisement media types, such as text, image, voice, flash, video, etc. In order to promote the delivery efficiency of multimedia advertisement content, some concepts of Content Delivery Network (CDN) are borrowed. This system consists of one Advertisement Description Server (ADS) and several Advertisement Media Servers (AMS). The former keeps the descriptive data of all advertisements and is responsible for delivering description information to user-side applications in a specific format, while the latter stores the actual multimedia contents of advertisements and works in a load-sharing manner for delivering the media contents. Advertisement Description Server also plays the role of "request dispatcher" to receive advertisement requests from users and forward them to different Advertisement Media Servers. In addition, some statistic-based strategies are deployed to make the Advertisement Description Server more "intelligent" when delivering advertisements, in which multiple statistical parameters (e.g., advertisement impressions, click-through rate, expense payment from advertisers, etc.) take effect to determine the selection of Advertisements to be delivered. This advertising solution has been adopted to provide the advertisement support for two other projects inside BLRC - MapWeb and IMS PC client.