Real time pricing, purchasing and auctioning of advertising time slots based on real time viewership, viewer demographics, and content characteristics

A system, comprising:

• a Real Time Advertising Auction Module stored in a memory device;
• and
• a processor communicating with the memory device, the Real Time Advertising Auction Module:
• i) receiving advertising auction data for bidding on one or more advertisement time slots of a content provider,
• ii) receiving business data to select an advertisement for an advertisement time slot,
• iii) receiving viewership data associated with a presentation of media content by the content provider,
• iv) matching the viewership data with the advertising data and the auction data to identify one or more advertisements as desirable for distribution to one or more viewers during the advertisement time slot,
• v) establishing a bid price for each of the identified one or more advertisements, the bid price adjusted according to the matched data for each advertisement and according to the business data for selecting the advertisement, and
• vi) awarding the advertisement time slot to one of the identified one or more advertisements such that a contract price for the advertisement time slot is maximized.

A storage medium on which is encoded instructions for performing the following:

• accessing advertising auction data for bidding on one or more advertisement time slots during presentation of media content by a content provider,
• accessing business data to select an advertisement for the one or more advertisement time slots,
• accessing viewership data associated with the presentation of the media content,
• matching the viewership data with the advertising data and the auction data to identify one or more advertisements as desirable for distribution to one or more viewers during the advertisement time slot,
• establishing a price for each of the identified one or more advertisements, the bid price adjusted by the advertising auction engine based upon the matched data for each advertisement and based upon the business data for selecting an advertisement, and
• awarding the advertisement time slot to one of the one or more identified advertisements to maximize a contract price for the advertisement time slot.

A method for auctioning an advertisement time slot, comprising:

• receiving viewership data that statistically describes a popularity of content;
• receiving a duration of the advertisement time slot;
• querying a database that associates bid amounts to the viewership data and to the duration of the advertisement time slot;
• retrieving a bid amount;
• and
• sending the bid amount as a bid for the advertisement insertion slot.