Contextual Tech Firm Unveils Products, Partnership
Technology promises to enhance relevance of contextually targeted ads.
Contextual targeting technology firm Crystal Semantics will debut three new products and announce a partnership with ad network Experclick Monday.
The three products build on Crystal Semantics’ core Textonomy Advance engine, which analyzes the content of pages and maps them to keywords. The offerings aim to help publishers and advertisers figure out which ads should be served to users viewing that content.
The first implementation, Textonomy Advance Server, is designed to integrate with existing ad networks and ad-serving technologies.
“It will look at the context of a page and hand back a category to the advertiser, so they can portray relevant advertising alongside the content of the page,” said Ian Saunders, managing director of Crystal Semantics.
The second, Textonomy Advance Web, is an ASP (define) version of the Textonomy Advance Server. This version is intended for use by smaller vendors and ad networks.
Textonomy Advance Client is perhaps the most unusual of the three products. It integrates with desktop applications, such as toolbars, and helps companies target content or advertising based on the page content users browse.
The company claims its technology goes beyond what’s being employed by Google, Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture), and other contextual ad players.
“What we’ve found is there is a general acceptance level that the industry has at the moment, and we’re looking to exceed those particular barriers,” said Saunders. “The majority of the activity seems to take place in some 20 themes. We’ve simply been able to identify key areas within those 20 that could be optimized to enhance a greater click-through rate and a greater level of accuracy in portraying advertising.”
The first partner to deploy Crystal Semantics’ technology will be Experclick, a Santa Barbara, CA, startup advertising network with about 12,000 publishers. Experclick will use the technology to enable banner-ad targeting within its network.
