News & Press Releases
Peer39′s New CEO Sees Untapped Potential For Semantic Advertising
by Jennifer Zaino
Semantic advertising startup Peer39 has a new CEO taking the reins by May 1. Andy Ellenthal has lived his online life in the advertising space, including running sales and account management at DoubleClick (purchased by Google in 2007), SVP of Sales at rich media tech provider PointRoll (developer of the growing rollover ads that was sold to Gannett in 2005, and CEO of quadrantone, a consortium of four major media companies aiming to bring a local audience and local content to national advertisers.
Now he says he’s hoping to help get semantic advertising “its due in the market.” Ellenthal thinks there’s an education gap to be filled so that “semantics becomes part of the advertising lexicon, and of course so it equates Peer39 to semantics. There needs to be a broader understanding of what we can bring to the table.”
In an ad world that has been all and almost only about eyeballs, semantics on its own and in combination with good audience data and powerful creative delivers new opportunities, he says, and he expects to be building out the company’s sales and business development infrastructure to help the market capitalize on them. Data matters, audience matters, but so too does managing risk, which is where all these elements plus semantics come together.
“Let’s say you bought the perfect audience using the data capabilities out there, but if you are talking about sentiment or brand protection and your ad is on the wrong page, then you’ve done more damage than good,” Ellenthal says. “It’s insanely important, If you think about bigger or established brands that built up equity over decades or 50 or even 100 years, you really need to protect that brand, in real time. The web operates in real time, so that becomes critical.”
One area Ellenthal sees untapped potential in is the advertising exchange space, and the emphasis at Peer39 will be on increasing distribution on the demand side platform and so prioritizing its product development around the exchange and DSP space. “I think you find a lot of advertisers are currently reluctant – maybe 50 or more percent of the market is reluctant to use exchanges in the way they ultimately will down the line, or use a DSP that plugs into an exchange when it deals with blind inventory.
“And I hear the stories about a lot of marquee publishers who won’t open up in a transparent way their inventory on some of the ad exchanges because they are worried about price erosion,” he says. To make this new ecosystem work requires a number of different inputs, including semantics, and that’s exciting, Ellenthal says. “There’s a huge desire on advertisers’ part to try and experiment and to play in the space, but if it means the director of advertising or director of online gets a 1 AM call from the CMO about an ad showing up next to objectionable content, they are going to shy away. And if Peer39 can provide a level of comfort, then we are going to accelerate adoption of all the new technologies that are available here.”
Beat the Backlash
Ellenthal says there was a large backlash in the last year against ad networks, which he saw in his role at quadrantone, where advertisers wanted assurance of transparency and knowing on what sites their ads would play. “It’s hard to tell where inventory is coming from today if you play in that space,” he says. “There’s always a certain amount of risk and if in addition to understanding context and meaning and sentiment, you could translate that into brand safety to avoid certain types of articles, that’s a huge bonus for advertisers and ultimately makes them more comfortable about diving into this new ecosystem.”
Meantime, could the role of semantic advertising grow larger in light of the most recent privacy-focused concerns? Some advocacy groups — including the Center for Digital Democracy, US PIRG, and the World Privacy Forum – have called for the FTC to look into how Google and Yahoo! advertising technology for bidding in real-time auctions to display certain ads to Internet users raises some issues about the exposure of user behavior. Without commenting specifically on this issue, Ellenthal notes he lived thought he DoubleClick privacy concerns of earlier in the decade, and so he understands the need to tread with care here, even if concerns ultimately are more about perception than reality.
“There are some really cool data capabilities out there and they work — a lot of them work and can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of online advertising. But someone will do something stupid in the next 12 months and make the consumer rightly uncomfortable because they are more protective about data and online privacy than offline,” he says. “That is almost a given. But being able to classify and match ads using semantics on the page is pretty safe and we think we’ll be okay with consumers.”
CEO and founder Amiad Solomon is being named President of the Company, and will concentrate his efforts on business development, product innovation and strategic initiatives. “This is exactly the phase of a company that I love to be involved with,” Ellenthal says. “The founding team has done lot of the heavy lifting to get to this point, and now we have to take the ball and run with it.”