• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, January 6, 2014

The Consumer Electronics Show is the starter’s pistol for the video business, (or, rarely, the brick wall for bad ideas) and before I mix even one more metaphor, let’s get to this piece of news. Innovid and its new partner Cisco are using CES to introduce a new system it says will allow broadcasters or third-party app providers to deliver advertising to the second screen based on keywords that are spoken in TV shows on the “first screen.”

On its face, this is the kind of announcement that, you can pretty much bet, would make millions of consumers scream, and thousands of advertisers cheer. Consumers like to be horrified by the concept of advertising devices they end up embracing and they end up embracing them, probably in part because brands and advertisers keep pushing the concepts at them.

Innovid’s press announcement imagines that a talk show host says the word ”tablet” and more or less immediately on your second screen on your lap,  up will pop an interactive ad for a computer tablet. While this would seem to be a very good reason to put your second screen device in someone else’s lap, I trust that’s not the idea.

Innovid is pairing with Cisco’s Contexta, a cloud-based system that analyzes broadcast content and generates contextually relevant metadata about words being spoken. Contexta apparently works a little like its root word—it analyzes who’s saying “tablet”  If it is Jon Stewart talking about an iPad or a Sunday preacher talking about Moses, Contexta figures that out and Innovid’s ad servers takes it from  there to decide if it will present an Apple ad or a commercial for a Mecca tour operator. Context is everything. (This tablet example, maybe, not the best.)

Tal Chalozin, Innovid’s CTO is pretty much the leading cheerleader for second screen interactivity—he said at a conference last year that pretty much all of the world is “all video, just different screens.” About this collaboration, he says, “Real-time synchronized second screen advertising enables the TV to keep the general message, while the second screen can be personalized.” The two companies are arranging demonstrations of the software at the CES show.

The new product seems to be the same one or similar to software Innovid and Cisco previewed at the IBC show last fall. At that show it also demonstrated software that can target consumers based on where their tablets are, and can beam ads based on that geographic location.

pj@mediapost.com