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)
So the BBC has partnered with a company called Acast, which claims:
"Acast’s sophisticated, contextual targeting uses dynamic insertion technology—which we invented—so brands can reach the right audience, in the right way, at the right moment, as many times as they require."
So the ads are inserted at the time of download, rather than at the time of production (the selling point of this being that a podcast's back catalogue can include modern ads).
answer (technical question, advertising)
@lizardsquid They invented the `cat` command?
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
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)
@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 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.