Patent Application
20240095781
With the continued increase in mobile device usage and the availability to digital content, advertising is shifting from generic print advertising to user specific and targeted digital advertising. However, this shift has resulted in advertisers having more difficulty developing targeted advertisements for the wide variety of consumers and their preferences. Likewise, advertisement creation for advertisements that are to be presented to consumers, for example, from within another application executing on a mobile device, remains a manual and inconsistent process.
Implementations described herein provide a system and method for automating the creation of advertisements, such as video advertisements, so that advertisers can dynamically generate a variety of different advertisements. For example, an advertiser may utilize a self-service user interface to provide content items to an advertisement creation system that may utilize those content items to generate an advertisement for the advertiser. In one example, an advertiser may provide a video file, select a template for the advertisement, select a genre, provide one or more call to action text inputs, select a background color for call to action displays, and/or select an outro color theme for an outro or end card of the advertisement. The advertisement creation system may then utilize that information and, without further input from the advertiser, generate one or more jobs for execution by computing resources, such as remote computing resources to generate an advertisement based on the provided content.
The advertisement creation system may assign one or more of the jobs to computing resource(s), provide content items to the computing resource as needed, monitor the progress of the job(s), and ultimately receive job outputs from the computing resource(s) as the job(s) complete. Once all jobs have completed, the advertisement creation system compiles the job outputs and produces an advertisement according to the inputs. The advertisement may then be provided to the advertiser for approval and use.
As discussed further below, the content items may be any form of content items that may be processed by one or more computing resources and/or utilized by the computing resources in generating the job outputs and ultimate advertisement. For example, content items may include, but are not limited to of video, sound, images, text, background colors, outro color, title, json files, compositor templates, compositor scripts, etc. Likewise, the jobs and/or capabilities may be any of a variety of types and the advertisement creation system may be agnostic to those types and capable of integrating with and providing content items to any of a variety of jobs and/or computing resources. For example, the jobs or computing resources with which the advertisement creation system may integrated with include, but are not limited to compositor scripts and/or compositor templates provided by/for systems such as ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS, LIGHTWORKS, AUTODESK MAYA, etc.
Independent of the inputs or the input types, the disclosed implementations may utilize computing resources, independent of further inputs from the advertiser, to autonomously generate advertisements on behalf of and for use by the advertiser.
Referring first to
The advertiser may also select a genre 108, such as “Puzzle” 108A, “Strategy” 108B, “Brand” 108C, “Casino” 108D, “Casual” 108E, etc. In some implementations, the list of genre 108 options may vary depending upon the selected video template 104. In addition, as discussed below, the selected genre for a video template may specify or alter the options of the advertising template used to dynamically generate an advertisement, in accordance with described implementations.
Still further, the advertiser may upload a video file 106, such as “puzzle.mp4” 106C, through selection of the upload control 106B. Alternatively, if the advertiser has already provided video files, the advertiser may select the “Choose from dropdown” control 106A and select one or more previously provided video files. The uploaded or selected video file, such as “puzzle.mp4 106C, will be used by the disclosed implementations in the creation of the video advertisement. In other implementations, other types of digital content may also be updated, selected, or otherwise provided. For example, in addition or as an alternative to uploading a video file, the advertiser may provide an image, audio file, and/or other forms of digital assets.
Continuing to
Still further, an advertiser utilizing the user interface may select a background color 112 to be used by the described implementations when creating call to action displays that are included in a video advertisement. Any of a variety of colors may be selected. In some implementations, an advertiser may be provided a color palette or swatch from which to select a background color 112. In other implementations, an advertiser may provide a defined color (e.g., Pantone color), or input the Red, Green, Blue (RGB) values between 1 and 255 for a desired background color 112.
An advertiser may also select an outro color theme 114, such as Light, Dark, Bright, etc Like the background color, an advertiser may selected a particular color for the outro color 114 and/or provide a selected color theme, such as “Light.”
An advertiser may also provide an application title 116 or name of the application advertised by the app that is to be created by the disclosed implementations. In this example, the advertiser has identified the name of the application as “my puzzle app!” In some implementations, if the advertiser inputs the name of the application as it is stored in a corresponding App Store, such as APPLE'S Application store, or GOOGLE'S application store, the disclosed implementations may automatically link the produced video advertisement to the corresponding application so that a viewer of the advertisement may select the advertisement and be automatically traversed to the download page within the application store to download the application.
Finally, an advertiser may select the “Submit” control 118 to submit the provided content items as part of a request to the disclosed implementations, to generate a video advertisement for the advertiser based on the provided content items.
Providing content items via a user interface, such as that illustrated in
Based on the received inputs and one or more templates, the ad creation system 200 may determine the jobs to be completed in generation of an advertisement based on the inputs. For example, a job may include segmentation of a provided digital asset, such as a video file, into a plurality of segments. Another job may include generation of one or more call to action displays that are generated based on the template, the selected background color, and the text inputs, provided as discussed above with respect to
Likewise, the ad creation system 200 may include or interface with a machine learning system 201-1 to determine estimated job completion times. For example, the machine learning system 201-1, may maintain in a data store 201-2 actual job completion times that it receives from the ad creation system 200 and/or directly from computing resources, such as the remote computing resources 250 for various different jobs and/or computing resource capabilities. Based on the actual job completion times, the machine learning system 201-1 may estimate job completion times of other jobs when performed by those resources.
Likewise, the machine learning system and/or the ad creation system may also determine an estimated que time based on a current que of jobs for each of one or more computing resources and estimate a total time for each potential computing resource to complete a job, based on the estimated job completion time and the estimated que time. Utilizing the estimated job completion times and estimated que times, jobs for an advertisement creation may be distributed to different computing resources in an efficient manner to balance a compute load across the available computing resources.
The ad creation system 200 may also include or communicate with computing resource(s) 250. The computing resource(s) 250 may be local to the ad creating system 200, remote from the ad creation system 200, or any combination thereof. Likewise, the computing resource(s) 250 may be configured to communicate over a network 203 with input components of the ad creation system 200 and/or the machine learning system 201-1.
As illustrated, the computing resource(s) 250 may be remote and implemented as one or more servers 250(1), 250(2), . . . , 250(N) and may, in some instances, form a portion of a network-accessible computing platform implemented as a computing infrastructure of processors, storage, software, data access, and so forth that is maintained and accessible by components/devices of the ad server system 200 and/or the machine learning system 201-1 via a network 203, such as an intranet (e.g., local area network), the Internet, etc. The computing resources 250 do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. Common expressions associated for these remote computing resource(s) 250 include “on-demand computing,” “software as a service (SaaS),” “platform computing,” “network-accessible platform,” “cloud services,” “data centers,” and so forth.
Each of the servers 250(1)-(N) include one or more processors 217 and memory 219, which may store or otherwise have access to web services 220, which may include or provide image processing, call to action display creation, j son file processing, compositor script processing, compositor template processing, etc.
The network 203 may utilize wired technologies (e.g., wires, USB, fiber optic cable, etc.), wireless technologies (e.g., radio frequency, infrared, NFC, cellular, satellite, Bluetooth, etc.), or other connection technologies. The network 203 is representative of any type of communication network, including data and/or voice network, and may be implemented using wired infrastructure (e.g., cable, CAT6, fiber optic cable, etc.), a wireless infrastructure (e.g., RF, cellular, microwave, satellite, Bluetooth, etc.), and/or other connection technologies.
As jobs are completed by the computing resources 250, the job outputs are provided via the network 203 back to the ad creation system 200. Likewise, actual job completion times may be provided back to the ad creation system 200 and/or to the machine learning system 201-1 and used to update the estimated job completion time data store 201-2 to further refine and improve the estimated job completion times.
Finally, the ad creation system 200 compiles the different job outputs and produces a completed advertisement 221 that is provided for use by the advertiser. In other implementations, compiling of completed jobs into the advertisement may itself be a job that is assigned to a computing resource. As discussed further below, the compiled advertisement includes and/or is based on the content items provided by the advertiser and/or the templates selected by the advertiser, as discussed above with respect to
In this example, the first call to action display 320-1 is the initial portion of the video advertisement and presented at an initial time (t=0). In other examples, a first segment of the video file may be presented before the first call to action display. In addition, the first call to action is displayed for a defined period of time (e.g., two seconds) and then a first segment 321-1 of the provided/selected video file 106C (
The second call to action display 320-2, like the first call to action display 320-1, in this example, has the same background color 312 selected by the advertiser as discussed above with respect to
Following the second segment 321-2, a third call to action display 320-3 is presented that includes the selected background color 312 and the call to action 310C provided as the third text slide 110C (
Following presentation of the third call to action display 320-3, a third video segment 321-3 is presented that includes a third portion 306-3 of the application or other item being advertised. In one implementation, the three video segments 321-1, 321-2, 321-3 may be sequential in time of an application illustrating a players progression through the application. In other examples, the video segments 321 may be short segments of an advertised movie, song, video, etc.
Finally, in this example, following the third segment 321-3, an outro display 322 or end card is presented with information about the advertised content and, in this example, a control 316 that enables a viewer of the advertisement to obtain or access the advertised content. In addition, the theme 314 of the outro display 322 corresponds to the outro color theme 114 selected by the advertiser (
While the illustrated examples utilizes the same background color, font, font spacing, and font size, for each call to action display 320, in other implementations, one or more of the background color, font, font spacing, font size, and/or duration of presentation, may vary for the one or more of the call to action displays. Likewise, while the illustrated example includes three call to action displays 320, in other implementations the video advertisement may be created to include fewer or additional call to action displays. For example, if the advertiser provides six text slides, there may be six call to action displays. As part of the advertisement creation system preparing the video advertisement, the provided or selected video file 106 may be appropriately segmented, for example based on time, such that each call to action display is presented as part of the complete video advertisement. Still further, while the illustrated example separates each call to action with a video segment, in some implementations, two or more call to action displays may be presented adjacent in time.
In some implementation the speed at which the advertisement is presented, the duration of the advertisement, the number and/or positioning of the call to action displays, the duration of which each call to action display is presented, etc., may be generated as part of the disclosed implementations and may vary based on the selected template and/or genre, as discussed above.
Based on the received digital assets, genre, category, and/or template, computing resources necessary to produce outputs for use in creating the advertisement are determined, as in 404. As noted above, any of a variety of digital assets may be received and processed by the disclosed implementations. As such, the type of digital assets may be determined and computing resources, such as remote computing resources, capable of processing those types of digital assets to produce desired job assets may be determined.
Based on the determined computing resources needed, one or more jobs are scheduled and initiated with those computing resources, as in 406. For example, if there are three types of different digital assets received, each of which require different computing resources to process, the example process 400 may determine that three different jobs are to be performed and assign those different jobs to each of three different computing resources. As discussed herein, job assignment may be load balanced across multiple capable computing resources to distribute the work and reduce the time required to process and prepare advertisements.
As jobs are completed, the job outputs from each computing resource are received by the example process 400, as in 408. In some implementations, as one job output is received from one computing resource, the job output may be provided as an input to another job to be performed by another computing resource. In such an example, the example process 400 may manage the scheduling and initiation of jobs by different computing resource so that a computing resource is not waiting for an output from another computing resource.
Upon receipt of all job outputs for jobs created for an advertisement, the outputs are compiled to create an advertisement, as in 410. In some implementations, the job outputs may be compiled or combined by the example process executing on the advertisement creation system discussed above. In other implementations, the job outputs may be compiled as part of a final job issued by the example process 400 to another computing resource.
Finally, the generated advertisement is provided to the advertiser and/or directly to consumers for viewing and selection, as in 412.
The example process 500 begins upon receipt of one or more jobs for completion in the creation of an advertisement, as in 502. Upon receiving one or more jobs, the example process 500 estimates the time required to complete each received job, referred to herein as estimated completion time, as in 504. As discussed above, in some implementations, a machine learning system may receive actual job completion times for various jobs and utilize those actual completion times to estimate future job completion times.
In addition to determining the estimated completion time(s) for jobs that are required to produce an advertisement, the example process may also determine estimated que times for one or more computing resources available and capable of completing one or more of the jobs, as in 506. Similar to determining estimated completion time for a job to be assigned, the example process 500 may utilize the machine learning system to estimate a que time of a computing resource based on the jobs assigned to the que and the estimated completion time for each of those jobs.
Based on the determined estimated completion times and the estimated que times, each of the jobs may be assigned by the example process 500 to a computing resource for completion, as in 508. As discussed above, if one job is dependent upon or needs an output from another job, such job may not be assigned to a que unless the job is not estimated to start until a time after the output of the job from which it depends will be available. For example, if the output from job1 is necessary as an input to job2, job2 may not be assigned to a que until job1 completes and the output of job1 is available. Alternatively, if job1 is estimated to take five minutes to complete and the estimated que time for a computing resource that is cable of processing job2 is eight minutes, job2 may be assigned to the que at the same time as job1, with the expectation that the computing resource will not begin processing job2 until the output from job1 is available, due to the estimated que time.
As jobs are completed, the output from the jobs are received, as in 510. As each job output is received, the actual job completion time may also be received and/or determined by the example process and a determination made as to whether the actual job completion time corresponds with the estimated job completion time, as in 512. The actual job completion time may be determined to corresponding to the estimated job completion time if the actual job completion time and the estimated job completion time are with a defined percentage of one another (e.g., 95%). If it is determined that the actual job completion time does not correspond with the estimated job completion time, the stored estimated job completion times may be updated with the actual job completion time, as in 514. In some implementation, the stored estimated job completion time may be replaced with the actual job completion time, or the stored estimated job completion time and the actual job completion time may be combined, such as averaged, to determine an updated estimated job completion time. In other examples, a machine learning system may receive the actual job completion time as additional training or tuning inputs and update the machine learning to generate updated estimated job completion times.
If it is determined that the actual job completion time does correspond with the estimated job completion time, or after updating the estimated job completion time, the example process 500 completes, as in 516.
The video display adapter 602 provides display signals to a local display permitting an operator of the server system 600 to monitor and configure operation of the server system 600. The input/output interface 606 likewise communicates with external input/output devices, such as a mouse, keyboard, scanner, or other input and output devices that can be operated by an operator of the server system 600. The network interface 608 includes hardware, software, or any combination thereof, to communicate with other computing devices.
The memory 612 generally comprises random access memory (RAM), read-only memory (ROM), flash memory, and/or other volatile or permanent memory. The memory 612 is shown storing an operating system 614 for controlling the operation of the server system 600. A binary input/output system (BIOS) 613 for controlling the low-level operation of the server system 600 is also stored in the memory 612.
The memory 612 additionally stores program code and data for providing network services that allow external sources to exchange information and data files with the server system 600. The memory also stores a data store manager application 620 to facilitate data exchange and mapping between the data store 618, ad creation system/web services 605, user devices, external sources, etc.
The memory 612 may also include the ad creation system and/or one or more web services 605, as appropriate. The ad creation system/web services 605 may be executable by the processor 601 to implement one or more of the functions of the server system 600. In one implementation, the ad creation system/web services 605 may represent instructions embodied in one or more software programs stored in the memory 612. In another implementation, the server system 600 can represent hardware, software instructions, or a combination thereof. The ad creation system/web services 605 may perform some or all of the implementations discussed herein, alone or in combination with other devices.
As used herein, the term “data store” refers to any device or combination of devices capable of storing, accessing and retrieving data, which may include any combination and number of data servers, databases, data storage devices and data storage media, in any standard, distributed or clustered environment. The server system 600 can include any appropriate hardware and software for integrating with the data store 618 as needed to execute aspects of the described implementations. The server system 600 provides access control services in cooperation with the data store 618 and is able to generate content such as advertisements and/or job outputs.
The data store 618 can include several separate data tables, databases or other data storage mechanisms and media for storing data relating to a particular aspect. For example, the data store 618 illustrated includes content estimated job completion times, actual job completion times, video files, templates, etc. User profiles, machine learned user models, and other information may likewise be stored in the data store.
It should be understood that there can be many other aspects that may be stored in the data store 618, which can be stored in any of the above listed mechanisms as appropriate or in additional mechanisms of any of the data stores. The data store 618 may be operable, through logic associated therewith, to receive instructions from the server system 600 and obtain, update or otherwise process data in response thereto.
The server system 600, in one implementation, is a distributed environment utilizing several computer systems and components that are interconnected via communication links, using one or more computer networks or direct connections. However, it will be appreciated by those of ordinary skill in the art that such a system could operate equally well in a system having fewer or a greater number of components than are illustrated in
The concepts disclosed herein may be applied within a number of different devices and computer systems, including, for example, general-purpose computing systems, and distributed computing environments.
The above aspects of the present disclosure are meant to be illustrative. They were chosen to explain the principles and application of the disclosure and are not intended to be exhaustive or to limit the disclosure. Many modifications and variations of the disclosed aspects may be apparent to those of skill in the art. Persons having ordinary skill in the art should recognize that components and process steps described herein may be interchangeable with other components or steps, or combinations of components or steps, and still achieve the benefits and advantages of the present disclosure. Moreover, it should be apparent to one skilled in the art that the disclosure may be practiced without some or all of the specific details and steps disclosed herein.
Aspects of the disclosed system may be implemented as a computer method or as an article of manufacture such as a memory device or non-transitory computer readable storage medium. The computer readable storage medium may be readable by a computer and may comprise instructions for causing a computer or other device to perform processes described in the present disclosure. The computer readable storage media may be implemented by a volatile computer memory, non-volatile computer memory, hard drive, solid-state memory, flash drive, removable disk and/or other media. In addition, components of one or more of the modules and engines may be implemented in firmware or hardware.
Unless otherwise explicitly stated, articles such as “a” or “an” should generally be interpreted to include one or more described items. Accordingly, phrases such as “a device configured to” are intended to include one or more recited devices. Such one or more recited devices can also be collectively configured to carry out the stated recitations. For example, “a processor configured to carry out recitations A, B and C” can include a first processor configured to carry out recitation A working in conjunction with a second processor configured to carry out recitations B and C.
Language of degree used herein, such as the terms “about,” “approximately,” “generally,” “nearly” or “substantially” as used herein, represent a value, amount, or characteristic close to the stated value, amount, or characteristic that still performs a desired function or achieves a desired result. For example, the terms “about,” “approximately,” “generally,” “nearly” or “substantially” may refer to an amount that is within less than 10% of, within less than 5% of, within less than 1% of, within less than 0.1% of, and within less than 0.01% of the stated amount.
Although the subject matter has been described in language specific to structural features and/or methodological acts, it is to be understood that the subject matter defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described. Rather, the specific features and acts are disclosed as exemplary forms of implementing the claims.
This application is a continuation of and claims benefit to U.S. application Ser. No. 16/290,316, filed on Mar. 1, 2019, entitled “AUTOMATED VIDEO ADVERTISEMENT CREATION,” which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 16290316 | Mar 2019 | US |
| Child | 18461434 | US |
