Last week, at SES San Jose (a popular convention for the SEO crowd), I participated on a panel called, “Don’t Call It a Comeback: Semantic Technology and Search.” Three of us gave presentations: Nova Spivack from Twine, Lane Soelberg representing Wolfram Alpha, and I spoke about some tests in semantic SEO that we ran on HubPages. Rounding out the panel were Othar Hansson from Google, Hope Hackett from Ask, Kevin Haas from Yahoo, and Mark Johnson from Bing, who also wrote a terrific recap of the panel on his blog. Dana Todd from Newsforce and SEMPO was the moderator.

Most of the discussion revolved around the impact of semantic knowledge aggregation would have on search engine results and the balance of search traffic. During Q&A at the end, though, Dana asked about the impact of semantic technology on advertising.

I offered my opinion that semantic ad targeting has been and will continue to evolve as a refinement of contextual advertising. Semantic technology’s strength is identifying what something really means, what the real meaning behind symbols and words. For example, a simple contextual match on a page about how to clear your browser cookies might serve up ads for Mrs Field’s. Semantic technology would notice the preponderance of tangentially-related terms on the page, such as browser, Web, program and the like, and probably result in an ad for Google Chrome instead.

Semantic technology should also sense the mood of a page, and know, for example, if serving up ads for Microsoft is appropriate on a site that could be potentially bashing them (not a good idea when most savvy Web users know contextual ads are often priced by click!).

Beyond text, the big opportunity is with display ads that, without proper and extensive tagging, usually are clumsy or impossible to contextually target. Making sense of metadata, tags and even copy and design elements within the creative grants ad networks the ability to make the most of their display inventory.

What technologies exist in this space? I already wrote about Peer39 and adpepper’s iSense last year. Here are a few companies that have developed semantic matching technologies in the online advertising space:

• Semantic Match (Peer39)
• iSense (ad pepper)
• Personifi (Collective Media)
• Apricot (4AdNetworks)
• ContextIn
• myLOBster Media Corpus (CID)

The field is being rapidly littered with failures, like Clikkit’s SemSense, Aduna, and Dapper’s MashupAds, so the technology is still in development and its full potential not yet achieved.

UPDATE:  We are glad to hear that Dapper’s MashupAds is alive and kicking … and has been renamed to Dapper Ads.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.