Barcelona, 19 March 2003 - Visual Century, a technology company based in Barcelona, has announced the European-wide launch of its exclusive ADingest press advertising monitoring system.

Using advanced computer vision techniques, ADingest automates the detection and identification of advertising inserts in the pages of newspapers and magazines. ADingest also automatically classifies adverts by format and calculates the surface they occupy. The system optionally includes digitization hardware, especially designed to speed up the process of acquiring images from broadsheets.

ADEX information, concerning the occurrence of advertising in the media, is of great interest for advertisers, advertising agencies, media planning agencies and the media themselves. With ADingest, the process of obtaining ADEX data from newspapers and magazines is faster, more reliable, and highly flexible, as well as easily adaptable to seasonal peaks in advertising. ADingest provides both quantitative and qualitative information, meaning that from the data obtained users can not only generate advert insertion statistics, but also access advert images and the context for all advert publications.

ADingest is currently in use at Infoadex, a company associated to the multinational group ACNielsen and leader in the Spanish ADEX market. In a highly dynamic and demanding environment, the implementation of ADingest has had a very satisfactory impact. ADingest has reduced training times and has proved to be especially effective when dealing with different versions of a same advert. "Infoadex is always at the forefront of innovation, and in this case ADingest is the system of the future to control press advertising", states Pedro Villa, technical director of Infoadex.

About Infoadex

Infoadex is the company that carries out advertising control and analysis (ADEX) in Spain. 365 days a year, Infoadex controls, archives and analyzes each and every one of all advertising inserts in conventional media: television, magazines, newspapers, radio, cinema, internet and outdoor. Infoadex began this activity over 30 years ago (through Repress and Duplo prior to 1994), and is associated to the multinational group ACNielsen, the world’s leading market investigation company. Because of this, Infoadex has access to the latest advances in market investigation worldwide, as well as access to international ADEX data about 71 countries in five continents. Infoadex has a team of 80 professionals and the most modern technologies to collect, archive, manage and process ADEX information.

About Visual Century

Visual Century is a technology company created in 2001 by a group of entrepreneurs with audiovisual and multimedia research backgrounds. Visual Century develops software products to index, analyze, store and access digital video, audio and images in asset management applications that include archiving, production, retrieval, browsing and navigation of rich media content. The Visual Century team is made up of highly qualified professionals that the quality, technology and innovation objectives of the company, and includes a fully dedicated research division. Visual Century products stand out because of their innovative vision of rich media content, and they are designed to facilitate the use, management and exploitation of video, audio and image content.