Brands that had tied or placed their ads next to Toyota ads have not been a happy bunch since the car maker’s troubles became public. These companies - say, tire manufacturers or car dealerships - are part of a group of brands that have found themselves unfairly tarnished due to association. "Brand reputations can be tarnished and damaged very quickly if they become associated with 'negative' content," Amiad Solomon, CEO and founder of Peer39, tells MarketingVOX.
Companies that adopt semantic advertising strategies - as opposed to, or in addition to, placing ads based on keywords or user behavior - have a better chance of avoiding such problems. Here’s why, he says:
1. Semantic technology is only concerned with the current piece of content that you are interacting with. It is, Solomon explains, a precise, granular taxonomy that allows for the technology to understand content based on the meaning and sentiment at the URL level.
2. Sentiments associated with news trends are elastic and evolving. Semantic technology can understand significant changes in the global discussion about a certain topic or person in real-time. “As news of the Toyota scandal broke, semantic technology instantly categorized the new content as being negative towards a specific brand, as opposed to traditional targeting technologies which continued to serve ads as if nothing had changed,” Solomon said.
3. Brands have transparency to observe where their ads are appearing. “Advertisers are not in the dark about their impressions and they can make sure that their dollars are being put to effective use.”
A Primer on Semantic Ad Technology
Like most new technologies, there is a lot of innovation happening in this space, writes the Chief Marketing Technologist. To better understand whether - or which - approach is best, the post breaks the space down into four categories:
#1: Contextual advertising with semantics. Several ad networks - Google's AdSense being the most popular by far - automatically analyze the content of web pages to dynamically determine which ads are the most relevant to serve there. “If I'm on a site reading about LCD televisions, they show me ads for retailers who sell them - without the publisher or the advertiser (or even the ad network) having to explicitly specify anything. This is really just contextual advertising, but when it uses semantic technology to determine the context, it's called semantic advertising.”
Now, if site publishers were to add semantic data to their sites via a bottom-up approach of RDF tags and/or microformats then that metadata could be used to increase the accuracy of contextual ads even more, he went on. "This would have the benefit (and some potential trouble) that publishers could give semantic ad networks hints about the semantic meaning of content on a page, leveraging true semantic web standards."
#2: Semantic search advertising. A new generation of semantic search engines that are using semantic technology to provide people with a better search experience. “This seems to be gaining traction, particularly in vertical search, where the meaning of words and relationships can be disambiguated relatively easily.”
#3: Dynamic advertising content. Facilitating the programmatic exchange of data across the internet, or making the web more "machine readable" so it can foster a new era of smart, connected software applications. The post tells of one agency that has applied this concept to dynamically feeding content into interactive Flash ads. “The idea is that an advertiser - particularly a retailer - can expose their latest offerings and inventory as XML semantic data, and then the creative person or agency who makes an interactive ad can read this data behind the scenes to dynamically change the content of the ad accordingly.”
#4: Advertising inside semantic data. Companies paying to have their semantic data distributed through certain networks, tagged with certain metadata under the authority of the network owner. “I believe there are vast entrepreneurial opportunities for vertical market networks here.”
