Color-targeted advertisingA story titled “The Year Without Toilet Paper” in the NY Times caught my eye this morning. When the page loaded, I saw something quite remarkable, or so I thought I did.

The banner and skyscraper ads surrounding the article seemed to be matched to the greenish glow cast by lighting in the article’s primary photo. How cool! I sat there for a few minutes wondering how the ads could know what the colors are on the web page they’re situated in, musing about Riya or some other image processing system that could be used to discern the primary colors of a web page. Or perhaps the system was reading meta-data about the images?

Color-targeted advertisingAlas, when I reloaded the page, a new ad came up, surely not meant to compliment the cool greenish hue of the article’s photo. Oh well, I’m sure this level of targeted advertising is in the cards, for now the ad industry has it’s hand full with cost-per-action advertising.