Sampling Russian television news broadcasts every 4 seconds and pairwise comparing those "visual ngrams" over an entire broadcast yields a powerful tool for cataloging advertising, identifying key advertising trends across the Russian television news landscape and how the ad economy is adjusting in the face of global sanctions. Using more sophisticated tooling for identifying ad content and using signature-based tracing approaches, it would be possible to fully automatically construct a live catalog of advertising activity across Russian television news to understand the brands, industries, products and services being advertised and how that composition has changed over the past year as the impact of sanctions has continued to build.
This analysis is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Internet Archive and its TV News Archive, the multi-party Media-Data Research Consortium and GDELT.