• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 26, 2007

Keyword search advertising has transformed much of the online business. Now it's about to impact a growing, but still largely underexploited, area of online content: podcasts. Wizzard Media, the fledgling advertising sales unit of technology firm and podcast aggregator Wizzard Software, is poised to introduce a keyword advertising feature to thousands of podcasts it offers for sponsorship to national advertisers and agencies.

The move comes as others are extending the role of keyword-based advertising into other areas of online media, including video, as evidenced by Blinkx's launch Monday of its AdHoc search platform and Digitalsmiths' announcement today of $6 million in funding to deploy its VideoSense system.

The keyword podcast application, meanwhile, is derived from a Wizzard-developed technology, which converts spoken words into text, enabling marketers to place their ads and sponsorships in content that is contextually relevant to their brands and messages. Just as importantly, the technology can be used to prevent sensitive advertisers and their messages from appearing in or adjacent to questionable content, which given the nature of Internet podcasts--where sex, drugs and illicit behavior may be featured--can occasionally be the case.

"It's a contextual application," says Jim Else, a long-time media industry sales executive who joined Wizzard recently as vice president-sales, heading up its Wizzard Media unit. "What the keyword technology does, is allow us to identify words or clusters of words in podcasts that match the key words that are contextually relevant to an advertiser."

The result could be ads placed inside podcasts, sponsorship of content, or even having podcasters make their own personal plug on behalf of the marketer or brand. That's common in radio sponsorships, and Else says it is also expected to emerge as an industry standard in podcasts.

In fact, Wizzard recently struck its first advertising deal--a non-keyword agreement with financial services marketer TD Financial--which includes podcaster-read commercials, as well as consumer promotions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the TD Financial campaign will cover downloads across nine different podcasts in Wizzard Media's network, including programs about technology, business and music. Wizzard will provide TD Financial with commercial reads by the podcasters, offering a special iPod giveaway to listeners who open new checking accounts at TD Financial.

Wizzard is weeks away from offering the keyword application to marketers, and Else says the company still is trying to gauge its value to advertisers.

"This isn't going to be like Google. There is no ad-serving involved. This is about having the right message show up in the context of the right content," he explains.

In fact, many of the 80 million-plus downloads that Wizzard's podcast network delivers each month are not viewed or listened to dynamically on the Web, but consumed as content on portable media devices such as iPods or personal computers, making live, dynamic ad serving, or links an impractical approach for advertisers.

In reality, Else believes podcasts will evolve to be more like old-time TV or radio shows, where sponsorship is an embedded aspect of a program's content.

Digitalsmiths, meanwhile, has announced the raising of $6 million in Series A funding from The Aurora Funds, Chrysalis Ventures and individual investors. The company's VideoSense system uses both audio and video recognition to match online ads to Web videos as they are being viewed.