Live Ebay adverts

Haven't seen these mentioned on here and I only noticed them myself because I saw one go wrong the other day.

Ebay are running live adverts (I have only seen these on ITV1 during Hells Kitchen so far) that highlight an ebay item and give the current bid price, closing time and a photo. The pre-recorded voice over says "Bid price accurate 20 seconds ago". Anyone know how these work? Are they 100% automated?

What other examples of live adverts have there been? I know in the USA, live adverts were common in the 50s and 60s but did we have the same system in the UK? I seem to remember an advert that was billed as being live in the late 80s/early 90s. It might have been for a newspapers bingo game or something.


Example:
http://www.rp-network.com/tvforum/uploads/1.jpg
and the item:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260157615204

In fact, this is an example of it not working as it should. The price should be on the screen, not 'check online'. I have also seen the ad fail completely so we got 15 seconds of black screen followed by the ebay endcap for around a second.

I've seen the advert and didn't realise it was live until I saw the time in the corner was right.

It has to be automated, since there is no telling when an advert will play out. ITV will probably have something running on their systems that acquires data for the service, so it is probably done from them.

What went wrong with the one you saw?

I have edited my original post to answer this, it more or less failed to play out at all.

Well, the one on just then seemed to work OK, price and all.

Yep.
http://www.rp-network.com/tvforum/uploads/2.jpg
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250163562059

That last item has gone up by 50p. The adverts work! On a serious note though, this must be great for Ebay. They really can get instant feedback and see what effect the adverts have.

I think there was a bingo one. The live advert I remember was one of the early Carphone Warehouse (when it did actually sell carphones!) ads with Mike Smith

Match.com live advert during Love Island last year.

http://media.guardian.co.uk/advertising/story/0,,1807071,00.html

Let me know if anyone sees my bed on one of these live adverts!

I take it someone from ebay has to flag an item as suitable for the advert and the computer then puts the relevant info on screen, otherwise we could be seeing adverts for signed photos of Jade Goody with "Current price £0.01"

This one (shown during Coronation Street) had a man doing the '...correct 20 seconds ago' voice over and a red graphic.

It shows that its not completely automated too. The item on Ebay is called ' THE SOUND OF MUSIC (REGION 2) JULIE ANDREWS NEW SEALED' but the advert just shows 'THE SOUND OF MUSIC DVD' someone would have needed to edit that at some point.

http://www.rp-network.com/tvforum/uploads/3.jpg
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110164767256

It looks like someone manually decides which ones can go up and edit the description accordingly so it fits in the window.

Everything else is probably live.

I wonder when your selling, do you get the option to include your advert for possible showing on TV. Of course, for an additional price.