On the first week of February, Semasio, the inventor of Semantic Audience Targeting, expanded their product portfolio with Contextual and Brand Fit Targeting Solutions to provide programmatic advertising professionals a new opportunity to seamlessly combine user- and page-level targeting into what Semasio calls a Unified Targeting Strategy.
Kasper Skou, CEO and Co-Founder of Semasio, says: "The industry is currently undergoing the biggest stress test of the past decade. Because Semasio builds user profiles based on the actual terms that users consume on the pages they read, contextual and audience targeting has never been an either-or approach for us but rather two sides to the same coin. This means we are uniquely positioned to provide Unified Semantic Targeting enabling our customers to target as much on the user level as possible and supplement with the page level as needed in the face of an increasingly uncertain future of 3rd-party user identifiability.”
In contrast to the traditional taxonomical approach, which relies on pre-categorization to understand a page, Semasio deploys a Semantic Approach using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the whole page and identifying its most significant terms and phrases. These weighted terms form its Semantic Page Profile. The Semantic Page Profile is then integrated into the Semantic User Profile of the user consuming the page. This affords a complete flexibility when choosing between targeting pages and users.
Semasio’s clients combine different inputs such as 1st-party data, positive and negative keywords or simply external URLs, and the platform translates those into the terms and phrases that correlate most highly with the target. Semasio calls this approach to target definition Semantic Precision enabling each client to define their target free of any taxonomical limitations and use it for targeting across pages and users. In practice it means you only have to tell the platform what you want to achieve once, and it will enable you to seamlessly target both users and pages with the same definition.
To complete the Unified Semantic Targeting Strategy approach, Semasio decided to add negative contextual targeting to the mix and call it Brand Fit Targeting. It is not so much about binary Brand Safety for which there are plenty of well-established providers, it is rather about an evolution of Brand Safety into something more unique to the brand, the product or even the marketing message. Using the same Semantic Precision Semasio’s clients leverage to seamlessly target users and pages, Brand Fit allows them to specify the exact topics, which they feel are dissonant with their marketing message and thus should be avoided. A practical example could be a global fast-food chain, which is planning to launch a new triple-patty burger. They will of course use Brand Safety to avoid content around obesity etc. but with Semasio’s Brand Fit Targeting Solution they would also be able to steer clear of topics such as veganism, vegetarianism and the CO2 footprint of beef production, which are dissonant with the marketing message around this particular product.
The Semantic Approach to page and user profiling is what dissolves the current either-or distinction between user- and page-level targeting seamlessly and enables executing truly unified targeting strategies. It all starts with understanding pages and users on their own terms, the terms pages contain and users consume on those pages, and therein lies the unification. Semasio calls it targeting on your terms.
Semasio was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Germany with offices across Europe and in New York. Today Semasio is the only Unified Semantic Targeting provider offering Audience, Contextual and Brand Fit Targeting solutions globally. The company is active in more than 30 countries and over 24 languages and its global data partnerships enable it to profile over 90% of the internet population in those markets. Semasio has over 90% match rates with more than 25 major activation platforms and offers Classic and Custom Targeting Solutions via Managed- or Self-Service models.