Introduction to Computational
Advertising
ISM293
University of California, Santa Cruz
Spring 2009
Instructors: Ram Akella, Andrei Broder, and Vanja
Josifovski
1
This lecture
Logistics of the course
Introduction & Overview of Computational Advertising
1.
2.
Classic advertising
Web advertising
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y
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The marketplace size
The actors: Publishers, Advertisers, Users, & “Ad agency”
Advertising as information
Trends in Computational Advertising
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3.
2
Graphical ads
Sponsored search
Content match
Connection with recommender systems
Mobile advertising
Open markets
Summary
Instructor
y Prof. Ram Akella
y Professor Information Systems
and Technology Management
at University Of California Santa Cruz
y Ph.D., EECS, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, 1976-1982
y B.S., EE, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India, 1971-1976
y http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~akella/
y akella@soe.ucsc.edu
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Instructor
y Dr. Vanja Josifovski
y Principal Research Scientist
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at Yahoo! Research.
Research Area: Computational Advertising
Previously at IBM Research working on databases and enterprise
search
M.Sc. from University of Florida, PhD from Linkopings University in
Sweden.
vanjaj@yahoo-inc.com
http://research.yahoo.com/bouncer_user/88
Instructor
y Dr. Andrei Broder
y Fellow and Vice President
y
y
y
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for Search & Computational Advertising
in Yahoo! Research.
Chief Scientist of Yahoo’s Advertising Technology Group.
Research interests: computational advertising, web search, contextdriven information supply, and randomized algorithms.
B. Sc. Summa cum Laude from Technion, M.Sc. and Ph.D. in
Computer Science at Stanford University under Don Knuth.
broder@yahoo-inc.com
http://research.yahoo.com/bouncer_user/17
Contacts
y Course Website:
y www.soe.ucsc.edu/classes/ism293/Spring09/
y TAs:
y Bin An ban@soe.ucsc.edu
y Chunye Wang cwang@soe.ucsc.edu
y Course Group Email:
y Ism293-group@soe.ucsc.edu
y Subscribing to ISM293-group email (enrolled students only)
http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/mailman/listinfo/ism293-group
y Lecture: 6-9:30 PM Wed.
y Office Hours:
y 5~6 PM Wednesdays, by appointment only!
y Room: TBD
y For now, please use the course group email to reach the
instructors and TAs
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Lecture Content
1. Introduction and Overview
2. Information Retrieval for Computational Advertising
3. Marketplace Design
4. Machine Learning Techniques
5-6.Sponsored Search
7. Content Match
8 Graphical Ads and Guaranteed Delivery
9. Behavioral Targeting
10. Overflow lecture: catch up, or optional topics:
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y
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Emerging Adverting Media or
Evaluation of On-line Advertising system
General lecture structure
y Overview: 1~1.5 hours
y In depth: 1 hour
y Discussion: 20~30 Minutes
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Boot camp
y Boot camp is twice per week, 5:00 to 6:00 PM
Mon. and Wed. in order to help students fill in
gaps, expand on some topics, & understand the
course better. We initially want to cover Linear
Algebra, the Lemur toolkit, and Elementary
Statistics and Probability
y Generally, TAs will lead the boot camps.
y Prof. Ram Akella will lead some boot camps as
well.
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Homework
y One homework per week
y Based on reading research paper, typically
answer a question in the following style:
y Why does the algorithms in the paper work?
y Try to extend the idea in the paper from a different
view of angle?
y How to modify it for a new scenario?
y Some homeworks will be conventional exercise
style.
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Project
y There will be one course project divided into
several mini projects. Examples:
y Crawling Ads, Indexing, and so on (TBD)
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Exam
y Two quizzes or one midterm (TBD)
y One final exam
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Grading
y Homework
y 20%
y Exam
y 40%
y Project
y 40%
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Questions?
y We welcome suggestions about all
aspects of the course!
y E-mail to
Ism293-group@soe.ucsc.edu
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Introduction to Computational
Advertising
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Disclaimers
y This talk presents the opinions of the authors. It
does not necessarily reflect the views of Yahoo!
Inc or any other entity
y Algorithms, techniques, features, etc mentioned
here might or might not be in use by Yahoo! Or
any other company
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Computational advertising – main
challenge
Find the "best match" between a
given user in a given context and a
suitable advertisement.
y Examples
y Context = Web search results
y Context = Publisher page
Sponsored search
Content match,
banners
y Other contexts: mobile, video, newspapers, etc
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What is “Computational
Advertising”?
y New scientific sub-discipline, at the intersection of
y Large scale search and text analysis
y Information retrieval
y Statistical modeling
y Machine learning
y Classification
y Optimization
y Microeconomics
y Recommender systems
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Establishing a new discipline…
19
Establishing a new discipline…
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Key messages
1.
2.
Computational advertising = A principled way to find the
"best match" between a given user in a given context and a
suitable advertisement.
The financial scale for computational advertising is huge
⇒ Small constants matter
⇒ Expect plenty of further research
3.
Advertising is a form of information.
⇒ Adding ads to a context is similar to the integration problem of other
types of information
⇒ Finding the “best ad” is a type of information retrieval problem with
multiple, possibly contradictory utility functions
4.
New application domains and new techniques are
emerging every day
⇒ Good area for research + new businesses
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Classic Advertising
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Brand advertising
Goal: create a distinct favorable image
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Direct marketing
Advertising that involves a "direct response”: buy,
subscribe, vote, donate, etc, now or soon
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Long history….
Japan ,1806
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USA,1890
Lots of computational this and
that …
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y
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Computational Biology
Computational Chemistry
Computational Finance
Computational Geometry
Computational Neuroscience
Computational Physics
Computational Mechanics
Computational Economics
…
All are about mixing an old science with large scale
computing capabilities
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What’s computational about it?
y Classical:
y Relatively few venues – magazines, billboards,
y
y
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newspapers, handbills, TV, etc
High cost per venue ($3Mil for a Super Bowl TV ad)
No personalization possible
Targeting by the wisdom of ad-people
Hard to measure ROI
y Computational – almost the exact opposite:
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Billions of opportunities
Billions of creatives
Totally personalizable
Tiny cost per opportunity
Much more quantifiable
Revenue flow basics
y What do advertisers pay?
y CPM = cost per thousand impressions
y Typically used for graphical/banner ads (brand advertising)
y Could be paid in advance
“Guaranteed delivery”
y CPC = cost per click
y Typically used for textual ads
y CPT/CPA = cost per transaction/action a.k.a. referral fees or affiliate
fees
y Typically used for shopping (“buy from our sponsors”), travel, etc.
y … but now also used for textual ads (risk mitigation)
y What do publishers get?
y Whatever advertisers pay minus rev-share (revenue-share) paid to
intermediaries
y What do intermediaries get?
y Whatever advertisers pay minus TAC (traffic acquisition costs) paid to
publishers
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US Online Advertising Spending
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Still growing (15% FH 2008 vs.
FH 2007)
Source: IAB
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US Online vs. Offline
advertising spend
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The advertising $$ budget vs. the
human time budget
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Computational Advertising
Landscape
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Graphical ads
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Graphical ad
More graphical ads
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Textual ads
Ads driven by search keywords –
“sponsored search” (a.k.a. “keyword
driven ads”, “paid search”, etc)
2. Ads directly driven by the content of a
web page – “context match” (a.k.a.
“context driven ads”, “contextual ads”,
etc)
Textual ads are heavily related to Search
and IR
1.
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Sponsored search:
Text-based ads driven by a keyword search
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More sponsored search:
Text-based ads driven by a keyword search
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Content match
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The actors: Publishers, Advertisers, Users, &
“Ad agency”
Advertisers
Publishers
Ad agency
Users
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Dual roles
Advertisers
Publishers
Ad agency
Users
y Sponsored search:
y Pub = AA (Yahoo!, Google)
y Content match:
y Pub = AA (Yahoo! content)
y Pub = Adv (“House Ads”)
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Advertising as information
y “I do not regard advertising as entertainment or
an art form, but as a medium of information….”
[David Ogilvy, 1985]
y “Advertising as Information” [Nelson, 1974]
y Irrelevant ads are annoying; relevant ads are
interesting
y Vogue, Skiing, etc are mostly ads and advertorials
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Finding the “best ad” as an Information
Retrieval (IR) problem
Analyze the “query” and extract queryfeatures
1.
•
Query = full context (content, user,
environment, etc)
Analyze the documents (= ads) and
extract doc-features
3. Devise a scoring function = predicates
on q-features and d-features + weights
4. Build a search engine that produces
quickly the ads that maximize the scoring
function
2.
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Behind the scenes…
Setting the ad retrieval problem:
Ads corpus =
Bid phrase(s) + Title + Creative + URL + Landing Page + …
Query features =
Search Keywords + Outside Knowledge Expansion + Context features
Context features (for sponsored search) =
Location + User data + Previous searches + …
Context features (for context match) =
Location + User data + Page topic + Page keywords …
Search problem similar to web search, but
y Ad database is smaller
y Ad database entries are “small pages” [+ URL]
y Ranking depends also on bids
y Ranking depends also on click-through-rate
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What is the best match?
y An ad has different utilities for publishers,
advertisers, users
y Quality (utility) Factor (QF) is different
y A-QF, U-QF, P-QF
y The ad agency has its own economic interest
y Might have different types of ads that are not
easily compared
y Might have economics/contractual obligations
that need to be fulfilled.
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A bit deeper: how does the
matching happens?
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A Semantic Approach to Contextual Advertising
[SIGIR 2007]
[AB, M. Fontoura, V. Josifovski, & L. Riedel]
y What is more important: the words or the context?
y Contextual ad matching based on a combination of
semantic and syntactic features.
y Classify both ads and pages into a 6000 nodes commercial
taxonomy
y The class information captures the “about-ness” of pages
and ads
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Matching ads and pages
winter
sports
skiing
JOE’S SKIING BLOG
….
My Atomic skis floated on
the fresh powder…
….pages
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snowboarding
(imperfect) match
Atomic boards
75% off!!
Semantic and syntactic score
Semantic component – weighted taxonomy distance
Syntactic component - term vector cosine
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Final score
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Results
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The crystal ball chapter: Trends in
Computational Advertising
A very biased sample
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The Recommender Systems
Connection
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The ad matching problem as a
recommendation challenge
y The traditional IR approach is based on a fixed
query
results correspondence
y For ads we
y Need CTR probability or user utility rather than
top-K results
y Have a continuous click-through feedback
y Challenge: incorporate the feedback
1.Long term loop: improve the ranking function
y
ML based ranking
2.Short term loop: use the statistics we have for a
particular (query, ads) pair
y
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Closest to recommender systems
A generic view – dyadic
interaction systems
y D. Agarwal, B.C. Chen “Feature based factorization
model for dyadic data” [In preparation]
y Dyadic Interaction data pervasive
y Recommendation systems (user-movie, user-music,
user-book)
y Web advertising (match ads to webpage/query)
y Content Optimization (match articles to users)
y Unit of measurement : dyad
(i, j)
y i= user, webpage,..; j= movies, ads,…
y Measure some response: ratings, click-rates,…
y Often have meta-data on dyadic elements
y Demographics, genres,….
y Goal: predict response for unknown dyads
y Better match-making, prediction
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Challenge: clicks are very rare
y Need to aggregate clicks/recommendations
y Pages belong to site section to sites
Page ∈ CNN/sports ∈ CNN
y Ads belong to Campaign to Advertisers Ad ∈ Ford
Focus ∈ Ford
y Similar to preference estimation for
Annie Hall ∈ Woody Allen Comedies ∈
Comedies
y D. Agarwal, A. B, D. Chakrabarti, D. Diklic, V. J., and
M. Sayyadian. Estimating rates of rare events at
multiple resolutions. [KDD, 2007]
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Challenge: how to find new ads?
y Similar to music recommender systems: need to
explore new songs but need to keep some
similarity
y Can take advantage of semantic taxonomy
y S. Pandey, D. Agarwal, D. Chakrabarti, and V. Josifovski.
Bandits for taxonomies: A model-based approach. [SDM,
2007]
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Mobile advertising
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How popular is mobile advertising?
(Limbo’s Mobile Advertising Report, US Users, 4th
quarter 2007)
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Specific features (and targeting
dimensions) for mobile advertising
y High precision demographics
y Location
y Geo (GPS or tower triangulation)
y Location functionality: Shopping mall, at home, airport, etc
y Personal context: working, on vacation, etc
y Social context
y Alone, with colleagues, with family, with friends, travelling, …
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
y
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Language
Handset capabilities
Bandwidth
Operator
Time of day
Speed (walking vs. driving)
Recent history
Etc
What can change the game?
y Instant couponing
y One time use coupons sent via SMS/MMS to
handset
y Handset as contactless credit/cash card
y Interaction with point-of-sale via optical readers
(one way), Bluetooth (two way), or wireless
network
y Direct purchase (tickets, take-out food, etc)
y Prevalent high precision GPS
y I-Phone, G1-Phone, …
y High res touch screen, closer to web experience
y Lots of things we haven’t thought about …
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What can change the game?
Inference from noisy data
y What can you infer from lots of people reporting
their position every few seconds?
y
y
y
y
y
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Real time traffic …
Opening hours …
Night clubs going out of fashion …
Very accurate life-style predictions
Interesting gossip ☺
Marketplace
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Advertiser agencies:
The Open Exchange
Bids $0.75 via Network…
Bids $0.50
Bids $0.60
Ad.com
AdSense
Bids $0.65—WINS!
Has ad
impression
to sell -AUCTIONS
Transparency and value
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… which becomes
$0.45 bid
So many topics, so little time…
y Publishers & media
y Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)
y Variable-data printing (VDP) newspapers
y …
y Users
y
y
y
y
Fluid legal landscape wrt regulation, privacy, etc.
As usual willing to trade privacy for functionality
OpenSocial, Universal Profile, etc
…
y Advertisers
y Move towards performance advertising
y Fine granularity ROI computation, analytics
y See R. Lewis & D. Reiley “Measuring the Effects of Advertising on Sales
via a Controlled Experiment on Yahoo!”
y …
y Advertising agencies
y
y
y
y
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Market becoming more efficient (arbitrage, exchange)
Less is more – manage user attention
Single user multi-media campaigns
…
Summary
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Key messages
1.
2.
Computational advertising = A principled way to find the
"best match" between a given user in a given context and a
suitable advertisement.
The financial scale for computational advertising is huge
⇒ Small constants matter
⇒ Expect plenty of further research
3.
Advertising is a form of information.
⇒ Adding ads to a context is similar to the integration problem of other
types of information
⇒ Finding the “best ad” is a type of information retrieval problem with
multiple, possibly contradictory utility functions
4.
New application domains and new techniques are
emerging every day
⇒ Good area for research + new businesses
67
Thank you!
broder@yahoo-inc.com
vanjaj@yahoo-inc.com
http://research.yahoo.com
68
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This talk is Copyright 2009.
Authors retain all rights, including copyrights and
distribution rights. No publication or further
distribution in full or in part permitted without
explicit written permission
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