Online advertising network ad pepper media has introduced a managed service based on its Semantic Behavioral and Retargeting platform. The idea is to leverage its proprietary page-level semantic analysis, which hails from Crystal Semantics (which it acquired back in 2006) in combination with its behavioral/retargeting capabilities, in order to bring some balance between the camps who believe in environment vs. audience segmentation. “It’s a combination where we let the technologies ultimately dictate what is the most important factor to success vs. set up a presupposition that one will out-power or outweigh the other,” says Jonathan Slavin, President, North America of ad pepper media.The fact, ad pepper contends, is that there really is no one right answer of which approach works best. Advertisers, for example, can target audience segments based on anonymous data that indicates characteristics, behavior or preferences, such as those leading to a “luxury auto enthusiast” grouping that an automotive company would be interested in. But, Slavin notes, “we say that the environment where you reencounter that user may have an effect on whether they act or not. So, through [semantic page] classification we step back and say, when we reencounter users in American football-related content, they don’t convert as well as when we do in luxury lifestyle content or investment research content. So you start to get the idea of potentially where you should be bidding on an impression both by audience and by content. That’s where the value starts to come in.”This should lead to a more comprehensive view of the content and audience segments that worked both during and after a campaign, reducing waste and missed opportunities in current and future marketing efforts, ad pepper says. “You can look at it horizontally and say how does this segmentation fit against this specific page of content, does it yield x result or not,” Slavin says. “And after a certain period of time and enough inventory has passed, you can essentially grab trends, understand that certain pockets of inventory aren’t working even though the segmented audience is right, or maybe part of the segmentation is off.” With the actionable and quantifiable data coming in, agencies can “ershape a media plan in midstride instead of post-mortem, after it’s run it’s course,” he notes.Crystal Semantics’ SenseEngine technology serves the important role of breaking down content at the page level with very deep and granular understanding, and is critical to ad pepper’s new program. Ad pepper took the step to combine semantics with behavior and retargeting data “to help facilitate and create a better fundamental understanding of a marketplace and ecosystem that is so convoluted now,” Slavin says.ad pepper’s relationship with Crystal means it has and still will work side by side to really with the semantic tech vendor to highly polish its insights and ability to leverage the technology. But last year the decision also was made for Crystal Semantics to license its semantic advertising technology to ad agencies, publishers, ad networks, ad exchanges and demand-side platforms, rather than being available only to ad pepper media. “It’s been a proven model over the past six years and we’ve run billions of ad impressions through the system and been able to enhance the performance and accuracy of campaigns,” Ian Saunders, co-founder and managing director at Crystal Semantics. He says to expect some announcements soon that relate to inserting Crystal Semantics into many different points of the new advertising ecosystem.“If we focus just on advertisers, that’s an aspect only addressing half the market,” Saunders says. “The publisher base also has a lot to gain.” Semantic technology helps publishers get a granular understanding of the spectrum of themes in their content, which makes it easier to monetize all of it – not just what typically sells for a premium, like financial content. “If they have more detailed, granular assessment of the full scope of content, they find that there are disparate pockets off high-value content spread in other verticals,” he explains.For instance, financial content may well yield high level of CPM (cost per thousand views) and travel lower CPM, but maybe some of those travel pieces also discuss foreign currency and travel exchanges.If that’s understood, “there is the possibility to group them into the finance category and yield greater CPM for that piece of content. It’s a fairly lucrative commerical opportunity and semantics give that sort of leverage to bring about a higher yield.”