• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, April 11, 2012

Ophir Tanz, founder at GumGum. thinks his company's in-image video advertising platform can monetize photos on Pinterest Pinboards. Through agreements with publishers, such as U.S. News and World Report, Orbitz travel site Away.com, and Daily News, GumGum can serve up expandable video ads in still photos on the sites. He believes the image recognition and targeting technology can do the same for Pinterest.

Hundreds of Web sites, from Time Warner to Hearst to Glam Network tap GumGum to turn photographs into interactive video experiences by overlaying text, banner or Flash ad units on top of the images through a piece of code on the Web site. Publishers get a share of revenue. It puts new inventory on the page through a still photo. Tanz said brands have begun to sponsor certain images of celebrities, sporting events, and politicians when they drive traffic from being in the news.

More than 25% of all video viewing in U.S. broadband households now occurs on platforms other than the television, such as PCs, smartphones, and tablets, according to research firm Parks Associates.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based GumGum claims to garner user engagement through targeted campaigns that yield 20 times the click-through rate of traditional ad networks. To promote "The Ringer," a thriller series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, CW ran a campaign from Jan. 25 to Jan. 31, where it worked with GumGum to overlay an interactive ad on the bottom of existing photos of interest to the target women and entertainment and TV enthusiasts wherever they appear on sites in the distribution network.

A small percentage of ads ran on photos of Gellar. The goal of the campaign was to drive viewers to the show by generating awareness, and generate social shares to Facebook and Twitter and the show's official site. Some of the success metric, for example, includes the play rate at 89.75%, and play-to-completion rate of 60.03%. The click-through rate on nearly five million impressions reached .65%.

GumGum sells ads both through CPC and CPM models, depending on the agreement.

The technology contextually matches words and images, which makes me wonder if this could become the answer to monitizing search queries using voice and gesture technology.

GumGum doesn't have an agreement with Pinterest today, but Tanz said he hopes a forthcoming planned discussion could change that.

Tanz said putting video ads in photos is a difficult technical problem to solve because it means understanding the image and breaking down to the keyword level. The technology must analyze the pixels, cluster the images, and determine the semantic meaning to triangulate the topic. "But it can be done for Pinterest," he said.