• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 10, 2011

Display advertising will make a leap this year in an effort to keep up with changes across the Internet. Microsoft and Vibrant stepped up innovations, each separately releasing new ad units and technology this week. 

Vibrant plans to release a suite of contextual tools for display ads beginning Thursday. The first in a line that will roll out this year taps semantic analysis, frequency of words, page positioning, source code data and demographics to determine contextual relevancy. The technology matches ad copy to the content in articles that appear on the Web page.

The company's creative services team designs and builds VIA Dynamic ads with live feeds that enable the advertiser's ad to match the page context in real-time, creating unprecedented contextual relevancy.

A typical Bertolli pasta ad would post on an Italian cuisine cooking Web site. With Vibrant's VIA Dynamic technology, that same Bertolli ad would dynamically adjust to feature keywords and phrases from articles on the page such as ingredients, restaurants and chefs -- enabling a more precise match between page and ad. VIA Dynamic also features Multivariant Creative Optimization, which helps performance by changing the ad's background color, fonts and call to action.

Microsoft's search engine Bing becomes one of the first brands to tap Vibrant's technology.

Separately, Microsoft released three new display ad units. The first, the Interactive Film Strip, supports convergence in the brand marketing funnel, taking a 300 x 600 ad unit and turning it into a 300 x 3,000 ad unit by connecting five panels. The interactive unit allows the advertiser to design each panel in the ad based on steps in the purchase funnel, from awareness to loyalty to customer retention. It will work in HTML5 for tablets and mobile phones.

Jenn Creegan, senior director of brand advertising at Microsoft Advertising, hopes to sign on the first advertisers to use the ad unit within the next few weeks. "We will be ready to run the first ad in late March, early April," she says.

The second ad unit, Page Reveal, integrates the consumer experience into the publisher's page. The style moves away from the "in-your-face intrusive ad" and more into a "consumer-plus-advertiser-equals the full experience" ad unit. The third ad unit, Calypso Marquee, aims to create efficiencies for advertisers, providing the ability to automatically re-size the ad depending on the ad unit. It leaves the agency to focus on the creative aspects of the ad, rather than production and technical specs.

The ads are built with social features, such as Twitter sentiment, polls and share functions. Brands also have an option to pull in search ads. The Microsoft ads will not pull in search technology, but they can integrate mapping and image search modules.