Seven taps AI to put ads in context

Seven West Media has landed a deal with Amazon Web Services to help brands create contextually relevant ads.

Seven West Media has landed a deal with Amazon Web Services that will see the broadcaster use artificial intelligence to analyse code programming and help brands create contextually relevant ads.

7CAP, which Seven claims is the “first contextual ad placement service” for broadcast television, will use data to identify objects, environments and mood states in programming that brands can align with and place advertising around.

Chief revenue officer Kurt Burnette told The Australian the data points would help maximise awareness and impact for advertisers.

“It’s combining the context of the creative into the program. Content is king and context is queen,” Mr Burnette explained.

“It puts all our content into the cloud. We use machine learning and AI to pick out all the different — happy, sad, sun, beach, drinking, crying … it spits that out into a data point. Say Arnott’s chocolate biscuits wants to have a happy moment around picnics. It will give me a list, then we can then put those ads next to the schedules in advance in broadcast, next to the ad breaks.”

It comes as part of a broader relaunch of Seven’s automated buying platform, CODE 7, which rivals the likes of 9Galaxy and newly refreshed BUY10.

Seven also announced a new partnership with Carsguide, which will use data from both parties to provide solutions to brands.

It comes a year after Seven launched Navigate Auto, a deal that combined data and research from the free-to-air broadcaster and News Corp to target consumers looking to buy cars.

The new products were presented at Seven’s annual TV upfronts, the last of the three free-to-air commercial broadcasters. The relaunch of CODE 7 and 7CAP were complemented by an all new line-up, which included a new international cooking show featuring former MasterChef judges Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan, and the return of reality formats Big Brother and Farmer Wants a Wife.

Seven chief executive James Warburton said the network had invested 30 per cent more in its big programs and franchises.

Mr Burnette admitted advertisers had been asking a lot of questions of the broadcaster, given its struggle with programs in the key 7.30pm timeslot.

“There’s no question there’s been questions asked and not everything worked for us this year. We’re the first to admit that. By our own standards, it’s not good enough, and I don’t think I’ve seen a newness of this magnitude,” Mr Burnette said.

“The nature of the shows that we’re bringing in are known formulas. What we tried to do in the past was launch new shows from scratch and that’s really difficult to do.”

Mr Burnette added that the response to Seven’s Olympics proposition had been “the strongest” he’d ever seen.