4D Sight enters virtual ad insertion market with Activision Blizzard as key client

A new AI and cloud-based ad insertion system that will be used by Activision Blizzard for the Call of Duty League is being rolled out by 4D Sight, a participant in the elite UC Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator program in the United States.

4D Sight virtual ad insertion technology brings new revenue streams to E-Sports leagues and teams.

“We empower content creators by offering new revenue streams that won’t jeopardise the audience experience, so they can thrive. Interruptive ads hurt the content, audience, and brand equity because they are forced and irritating,” says Erhan Ciris, 4D Sight CEO and founder. “By placing ads in context, we build trust and long-term loyalty with digital communities.”

4D Sight says more than 140 esport teams are using the platform to monetise and enhance their livestream gameplays, and as COVID-19 paused many traditional sports, prestigious leagues and teams—including the Washington NFL team—have turned to the 4D Sight solution to increase ad capacity.

4D Sight also announced funding with early investments from UC Berkeley SkyDeck Fund; William Hockey, Co-founder, Plaid; Michael Dubin, Co-founder and CEO, Dollar Shave Club; and Kai Huang, Co-founder, Guitar Hero, among others.

During the pandemic, many sports fans have avoided venturing out into the physical world, and advertisers are looking even more seriously at the virtual world for revenue according to eMarketer’s US Esports 2020 Report.

For sports and esports streams, 4D Sight embeds and targets contextual ads without breaking the content flow. The company says the solution is extremely easy and cost-effective for media rights holders to use.

The platform has removed all overhead and integration costs from the native ad insertion process, and no special hardware like green screens, cameras, game production crews or game engine integration are necessary. Clients easily reroute streaming content through the 4D servers for processing and placing the ads, as well as for extracting insights from tracking user conversions and brand safety measures. The algorithms are incredibly fast, says the company, so all of this happens in less than 0.4 seconds.

In highlight reels or even in real-time, 4D Sight’s AI recognizes when there may be an extra-exciting moment, based on the body movements, and determines when and where to place the ads, directly into the stream of the game. These in-context ads can create revenue where there was no previous monetisation opportunity.

The 4D Sight content monetisation platform resists ad blockers by encoding ads into the video; allows for contextual awareness for key moment tagging; provides brand safety controls in live streams; and offers brand sentiment analysis using NLP via chatboxes, tracking conversations on the chatboxes and measuring brand sentiment. It is platform and medium agnostic so ads can be placed in any type of video and the ads can be customized ads on the fly for the audience, ensuring the right versions of ads are inserted depending on language, location, and other factors.