Contextual Ads Provide New Revenue Opportunity
Planet Discover Enhances Advertising System with Latest Offering
With its new contextual advertising product, Planet Discover now provides media companies with an advertising solution that delivers local display ads based on thematic analysis of their article content.
Clients utilizing the Planet Discover contextual ad product have the ability to target advertisers based on the themes of articles being ingested into Search Publisher, the company’s Web-based software. For example, an outbound sales group can access reports available in the Search Publisher administrative interface to see themes identified by the semantic engine based on current content in their market to target potential advertisers in a timely manner.
Using the screen shot below as an example, if "tennis," "Andre Agassi" and "sports" are themes generated by the semantic engine, a sales organization can use that information to target advertisers, such as sporting goods stores or tennis clubs, for a timely campaign to drive near-term business for the advertiser and incremental online revenue for the media company.
The outlined widget in the right rail of this sample article page includes Related Topics generated by the semantic engine as well as Related Ads - a graphic text ad and rectangular IAB display ad.
To deliver this new functionality, Planet Discover software engineers integrated a semantic engine into Search Publisher. The semantic engine works simultaneously with the search index used to deliver relevant news results.
Search Publisher continues to deliver news results based on relevance and timeliness, while semantically analyzing the content being ingested into the software. As a result, Search Publisher now delivers a variety of advertising units – such as text and graphic ads – to client-hosted pages based on the semantic themes of the content.
Search Publisher contains reports of the terms generated by the semantic engine that can be used to target relevant advertisers.
Response to the new contextual ad product has been "tremendous," according to Planet Discover President, David Lenzen. "Clients and prospects alike have indicated there's nothing quite like this available today."
"We believe the ability to deliver contextual ads in search results, as well as on client’s content pages outside of search, provide our partners with a differentiated offering, allowing locally based advertisers to target their message based on the context, or theme, of the pages where the ads appear."