technical question, advertising
I'm listening to a podcast from the BBC, which says "this podcast is supported by advertising outside of the UK" and then plays an ad.
Except the ads have all been specifically for Australia. I assume they're not just spamming all listeners with ads for Australian banks, but then my question is this:
How do they know to send Australian ads to my podcatcher?
How do they insert specialised advertising part-way into an mp3 file?
answer (technical question, advertising)
@lizardsquid They invented the `cat` command?
answer (technical question, advertising)
@madewokherd (also it's a little more complex than cat, because you need to tweak the header as well, otherwise playback can malfunction)
answer (technical question, advertising)
@lizardsquid Best I can tell, mp3 doesn't have a header.
answer (technical question, advertising)
@madewokherd it has headers for each frame, so it looks like this:
header data header data header data header data ....
if your ad is a single frame, you can insert it in as a (header data) set just before another header.
But if you try and insert it in the middle of a data section, then you get problems, because you'll have:
header data header da [header data] ta header data
Then the sync points don't match up, and you get errors in playback
answer (technical question, advertising)
@lizardsquid Obviously, you wouldn't do it that way. You'd `cat part1.mp3 ad.mp3 part2.mp3`.
answer (technical question, advertising)
@madewokherd oh sure, I'm not saying it's super complex
(although that approach also would cause problems - if the files have different id3 tags, then mp3 players might not display things consistently)
The thing they're claiming to invent is the *dynamic* advertising part, where it figures out what ad to insert based on region, time of day, and other collected information about users.
answer (technical question, advertising)
@lizardsquid They invented targeted advertising?
answer (technical question, advertising)
@madewokherd that does seem to be what they're claiming, yeah
answer (technical question, advertising)
@madewokherd the thing that they claimed to invent is inserting targeted ads at download time, instead of less targeted ads at release time