Armchair Theorist

The Singapore Digital Media Festival 2008 was held this past Friday at The Legends at Fort Canning Park. Unlike past “2.0″ events where I would attend as an interested individual, this time I attended DMFest as a representative from Microsoft, participating in one of the Web 2.0 panel discussions.

In this blog entry, I won’t be giving a play-by-play of what happened throughout the day, because of three reasons:

1. I arrived at around noon, thus missing out on the sessions in the morning.
2. The event has already been covered wonderfully by our tireless and dedicated livebloggers Claudia and DK. (Bravo!)
3. It’s 4:00 am in the morning and I really need to get some sleep soon…

Instead, I’m just going to share some key takeaways and observations I had from attending the event.

On the Use of Social Media

DMFest was organized by the Digital Media Chapter of the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF). Thus, it was not surprising to see the DMFest organizers leverage social media and interactive media for both the marketing of the event, as well as the execution of the event.

On the DMFest home page are prominent links to the DMFest Twitter feed and Facebook group. The organizers also invited many local bloggers (who were credentialed as media) to cover the event. Besides Claudia and DK, Walter Lim, BL, Shalabh Pandey, Andrew Peters, and Shunjie also wrote about the event. (Shunjie was also on th Web 2.0 panel with me).

From my experience, IT events in Singapore are either very corporate (a.k.a. “enterprisey”), with very little social media coverage, or very “social media-ish”, with very little corporate representation.

Therefore, it was refreshing for me to finally see an event where although it is corporate-driven at the core, yet it still manages to bring in and involve the social media community.

Kudos to the organizers for making an enterprise event into something more cool – and the involvement of social and interactive media certainly has a lot to do with that.

(BTW, I thought the use of an interactive monitor during the event sessions was also an excellent touch. Controlled by Bill Claxton, the interactive monitor showed related articles, Wikipedia definitions, the DMFest live twitter feed, and other interesting in-context information while the speakers were presenting. Brilliant.)

On Contextual Video Advertising

Folks, this is going to be pretty big, pretty soon.

Contextual video advertising is essentially this: As a user is watching video content online, the user is presented with unobtrusive ads which directly relate to the content which the user is watching at that moment.

For example, suppose you were watching a soap opera online, and suddenly in the scene a Mercedes-Benz car pulls up to one of the characters. At that moment, a small unobtrusive ad for Mercedes-Benz may appear which the user can click on to get more information about that particular car.

Here is a visualization of what I just described:

Contextual advertising for Mercedes-Benz appears when a Mercedes-Benz car appears in the video

Mercedes-Benz ad which appears if the user wants more information, while allowing the user to still watch the original video undisturbed.

(I encountered a small glitch when I showed the above demo of contextual video advertising during DMFest, so these are the screen shots! )

Contextual video advertising is very powerful, since it can present itself to the users in a way that lets the users think that it is a value-added service instead of something that takes away from their video watching experience. My demo, which was a MOBTV mock up built on Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, demonstrates precise contextual video advertising which works brilliantly together with in-video product placement.

Coincidentally, both Stefano (from Adobe Ultimate Video FX) and myself talked about contextual video advertising during DMFest. Adobe’s approach, however is to use sound-recognition technology (from Adobe Soundbooth?) to determine the video content in order to serve relevant ads. (Blinkx, one of the companies mentioned during DMFest also has similar technology, I believe.)

Regardless of the approach, contextual video advertising is definitely something game-changing which we should keep a lookout for in the next six to twelve months.