By Jennifer Zaino
iSense and SiteScreen, the semantic technologies from ad pepper for contextual display advertising and brand protection, are key building blocks behind the digital marketing services and technology solutions provider’s new adXplus real-time bidding (RTB) platform. The company, which by and large until now has focused on spot media buys and its own ad network, has spent 18 months enabling the deployment of these capabilities at scale via its proprietary RTB platform, across leading RTB-enabled ad exchanges and sell-side platforms, as well as its own publisher network.ad pepper counts among new partners for its adXplus RTB platform, which is a fully managed service, Admeld, AppNexus, The Rubicon Project, and Doubleclick Ad Exchange. “This is enabling us to deploy our campaigns at scale with all our targeting capabilities across millions of sites made available through these partnerships,” says Sacha Carton, ad pepper’s director, product and technology development.Carton says that the features its technology is bringing to the RTB space – 3,500 categories for precise page-level targeting, brand safety filters covering 18 objectionable categories, and black- and white-list delivery options – are important because “you are talking of so much scale in terms of reach and distribution, that to jump in with no predefined assumptions on what can work for you from a targeting perspective could mean you would be lost and wasting money not getting to inventory suitable to your objectives.”He also points to a sophisticated automatic, algorithm-led optimization engine that evaluates each impression and user against all the data points it has, whether semantic- or performance-related, to continuously optimize message delivery to best-performing audiences and content segments and adjust bid values per impression. “We do it at the URL level which is compelling, because you can say that your ads and messages work effectively on specific URLs and so you can switch off underperforming URLs,” he says. That’s a better option, he says, than performing at the domain-level only, which may cut off appropriate ad distribution points.Don’t Trim That TaxonomyWhile some other semantic advertising platforms have been pursuing RTB opportunities for awhile, Carton says that it’s often the case where such vendors that are not themselves media businesses have integrated into agency trading desks or selling platforms with very trimmed-down taxonomies. “Most DSPs can’t cope with the level of data coming through a 3,500 category system,” he says. The optimization engine in adXplus is improved for the RTB space, to “leverage all that data in its most granular form to base delivery and optimization decisions on…Optimizing a campaign semantically with information and data at a more granular level gives you more opportunities to get more performance out of your media spend.”adXplus launches in both the U.S. and Europe simultaneously. It’s the only RTB-enabled platform that will be fully operational with 12 languages, he says, which is particularly critical in the European market. “By and large in Europe we are the only platform with so many languages and categories and we are among the top two with the most category segments in the U.S.,” Carton says.As a company Carton sees ad pepper migrating in the direction of RTBs, and he expects that having its own proprietary semantic technology will make it a stronger competitor there. RTBs represent, he says, a “natural evolution of the space. The efficiencies RTB brings to the online advertising world are flabbergasting as compared to the previous way of doing business, and so will continue to win an increasing amount of spend in the market.It is a very, very competitive ecosystem, and by and large the competition will become more and more about technology and analytic capabilities, and those that are able to develop the right platform will succeed,” he says.