What is Semantic Advertising? Who Are The Top Vendors?
Meaning + Promotion = Semantic Advertising
Semantic advertising is the marriage of content analysis with online advertising. As first discussed last year ( The Semantic Web – Prove It to Yourself in 5 Minutes and What is the semantic web? Why do I want it?) semantic technologies are the bedrock tools and standards that enable the web to begin to both understand itself and to create meaning.
Semantic analysis of content provides advertisers with the opportunity to more finely tune ads through a robust understanding of the environment in which the ad is placed. This in turn would ideally generate higher click-through rates as consumers respond to increasingly more relevant ads.
The quality of the semantic advertising is a function of the:
- algorithms used to derive semantic meaning from the web page
- the ad network used to manage and deploy ad inventory
A quick way to get up to the speed is to look at some of the top players in the field (though this list is by no means exhaustive).
Who Are The Top Vendors for Semantic Advertising?
Vendor Name Vendor Blurb Tool
Apricot
Apricot. "Apricot crawls and processes publisher's and advertiser's web pages' content, analyzes these pages, finds keywords and identifies their functions and relationships in the sentence." Contextual Analysis
CollectiveMedia
"Collective's renowned suite of targeting capabilities, our highly selective standards for advertising, and our advanced optimization not only yields the highest value for your inventory, we also elevate your brand with quality, relevant advertisers" Targeting by Context
Hapax
Amplify. "Amplify is a web service that brings human understanding to content. By analysing content and returning its meaning in a usable and actionable structure, the Amplify platform enables advertisers, publishers and networks to take the guesswork out of brand safety, targeting and SEO online." Contextual Analysis
Leiki
Leiki. "Leiki provides patented software technology that automatically targets advertising and personalises content and community services. The functionality is based on the most detailed automatic content analysis and real-time learning of the user's preferences." Targeting by Context
LucidMedia
Click Sense. "ClickSense provides page-level contextual analysis that reads the web page of a potential impression and classifies it among our 14,000 categories to ensure it is appropriate for your advertiser's needs. " Contextual Analysis
Maxifier
"Maxifier is the innovative new solution for publishers and ad networks who want to optimize the revenue from their online advertising inventory after campaigns have been launched." Optimization
Proximic
Proximic. "Pattern Proximity - our patent-pending technology - to connect content, ads, and users with breakthrough precision in contextual matching and targeting. For both advertisers and publishers, it's essential to make the most accurate match - that's what Proximic is out to improve." Proximity Analysis
Health care advertisers looking to drive traffic to unbranded, disease-awareness sites would benefit from a robust understanding of semantic advertising.
Buzzword Status Score
- Hype: Low
- Value: High
- Origin: Convergence of semantic technologies with online advertising best practices
- Timeframe: Worth your attention
Ben Stein
Interesting post, and I’m glad to see the growing interest in Semantic Advertising technologies.
I’d like to reference you to ContextIn – which offers a unique approach for Semantic Advertising – addressing the display-ad media buying: making it more transparent, accountable and profitable, using patent-pending multilingual semantic algorithms.
Mark Hollander
Thanks Ben. Took a look at http://contextin.com/ and played with the “URL Classifier” on this post. Here’s what we got back:
Results for: http://group8020.com/bs-report/semantic-advertising-3163/
Top Category Name Semantic Relevance Score
/Computers/Internet 0.411
/Computers/Software 0.357