Video hotspotting is a technique marketers can use to highlight certain areas of a video and make them clickable. This is useful for monetizing video content, particularly if it was generated by users, because you can now “tag” the items and directly connect them to eCommerce actions such as “View product”, “Add to the cart” or “Buy”.

So far, the technique has been used by advertisers, which makes a lot of sense. Innovid is one of those companies with plans to automate the hotspotting process. In fact, tagging videos for hotspots is extremely cumbersome and takes a fair amount of post-production time, since every frame in the video needs to be viewed and manually tagged.  If this technology were to be used on a large scale for advertising purposes, the process would need to be automated with clever techniques for following objects in the video, therefore eliminating the need to tag every frame.

There are a number of research projects on automating the hotspotting process, like at the University of California, Berkeley. There, researchers like my friend Pierre Garrigues are tweaking smart algorithms to “follow” objects in a video in partnership with the Hollywood Movie Industry.

While there is enormous potential for inserting contextual information in videos, it remains to be seen if this particular technology gets user acceptance. Pre-roll, pop-roll and pop-up links have demonstrated their ability to drive ad clicks because the marketing message is displayed without user intervention. Relying on the user to mouse-over the right part of the video seems a little risky and will inevitably generate low click-through rates.