News & Press Releases
Worried About CPM Erosion? Semantic Targeting May Help Build a Beachhead
by Jennifer Zaino
Programmatic ad buying and dynamic media selling form the wave of the future, says AdMeld co-founder and chief revenue officer Ben Barokas. To help publishers, as well as demand partners such as DSPs, ad networks and exchanges, catch the wave, the yield optimization platform vendor has partnered with Peer39 to equip them with semantic targeting for improving matches between ads and content.
“No doubt the buying and selling of digital media must get more efficient and must be more data based,” Barokas says. “A lot of people are making decisions based on their gut and not good data analysis.” Value is lost when you’re not tapping into the dynamism of the data that can influence how ads are bought and sold, and opportunities are missed when publishers rely on the old models of self-categorizing content in static sections that don’t meet advertisers’ needs.
“When you put a semantic overlay on the inventory and properly explain the semantic definitions to publishers and advertisers, everyone wins,” he says. Publishers then are better able to package and sell inventory in the way the buyers want to buy it.
At the same time, partners such as DSPs also can leverage data points around the more distinct categorizations Peer39′s semantic technology enables to optimize their own decisions. As an example, they can provide to advertisers who are interested not only in sports content but more specifically in football content – because they know that’s the audience most likely to convert or be influenced – inventory that particularly fits those requirements. “So instead of sending 100 million requests that day they can send just 15 million requests that are just classified as sports and football. That saves everyone money,” Barokas notes. And partners can further categorize or place additional semantic targeting information layers to lead to a much more efficient way of doing business, which excites DSPs, he says.
What’s It Worth
If accurate semantic data can dramatically affect the value of an impression, that additional layer of actionable data may help publishers overcome some of their concerns over price erosion with respect to CPMs (cost per thousand impressions). “More data and good data analysis can provide a powerful impact to direct the publishers’ business and the whole advertising ecosystem,” says Barokas. Adding semantic categorization for an extra level of precision matters in a world of real-time bidding, a factor built into yield optimization platforms — some believe the advantages of RTB tend to accrue to advertisers over content providers. “You can see a 50 or 100 percent increase in CPM where that additional categorization is evident,” he says. “They know the advertisers can extract better performance from that more granular categorized inventory.”
In the past, it was very difficult to separate out what is the value of the content, what is the value of the audience and what is the value of the publishers’ brand, Barokas points out. “Everyone wants to get down to what are the elements of a piece of advertising inventory, and how to value each separately, and as a publisher what is my brand worth,” he says. “Without that market dynamic, that real-time ability to have responses based on categories, audience, and publishing brands, you don’t have liquidity enough to connect the dots.” With it – including the understanding that semantic insight can bring to historical market data, such as what particular category segments actually are worth – it’s easier to get fair value for inventory, he believes, even as the plug-once, auto-target-many times model lowers overhead and boosts efficiency.
“The success of any exchange depends on both sides being satisfied, and I believe that publisher confidence in exchanges and real-time bidding will only increase with this new [semantic] targeting approach,” which increases the value of inventory that publishers make available via the yield optimization platform, says Peer 39 founder and president Amiad Solomon. “Publishers that send inventory to AdMeld’s network will quickly overcome their CPM erosion concerns as they see their impressions tagged with real, actionable categories for bidding purposes.”
Solomon says Peer 39′s just-announced relationship with AdMeld is significant in that it’s a case of a leading yield optimization platform using semantic data to boost the value of inventory at a massive scale. “This partnership allows many top publishers that funnel their inventory to DSPs or networks to benefit from semantic classifications on their impressions and see higher CPMs across the board,” he says. “On the other side, advertisers are able to reach engaged audiences at huge scale across billions of impressions.”