Personifi, a division of Collective Media, launched a new version of its ad management and audience targeting platform.

The update includes a new application, called Audience Manager, targeted directly to ad networks and online publishers. It enables:

• creation of personalized contextual and behavioral audience segments to meet the needs of individual advertising campaigns.
• ability to group audience categories, add new ones and adjust keyword associations, allowing for more precise audience-segment targeting.
• Semantic technology pairs ads and segments with web page content, based on meaning. Keywords can be given either positive or negative weightings so that ads are not shown within inappropriate content.

As an example to the above, an airline might add keywords like "low-fares" or "island vacations" to a number of travel-related audience categories, but exclude potentially negative keyword associations like "hurricane" or "crash."

It remains to be seen whether the system is sophisticated enough to "red flag" sticky situations, such as one instance in 2007, when Microsoft served an ad featuring a water cooler — alongside the news story of a woman who overdosed on water and died: