New York — Yahoo’s Right Media ad network has made an alliance with LucidMedia, an online contextual advertising platform and meta-network, to introduce highly targeted contextual display advertising across the Right Media Exchange, the Internet’s largest advertising exchange, the companies announced Tuesday.
The new targeted ad solution capabilities, which first commenced testing in May, culminated into partnership between the two, fosters a new level of targeting for both buyers and sellers on the Right Media Exchange, helping to ensure that advertisers’ creative display advertisements appear alongside relevant content on publishers’ sites.
“Buyers and publishers will be able to contextually categorize 60 vertical channels in Right Media Exchange’s display advertising inventory.”
“LucidMedia’s ClickSense technology will significantly help increase the prospective yield of a publisher’s available inventory and improve an advertiser’s ability to contextually target ads to relevant content and categories through the Right Media Exchange,” said Bill Wise, General Manager, Right Media. “We are excited to bring this capability to Exchange participants and look forward to working with the LucidMedia team to deepen the use of ClickSense across the Exchange.”
Under the deal, Right Media will support the use of LucidMedia’s patented ClickSense contextual advertising targeting engine by buyers and sellers on the Exchange.
“We have been working with Right Media for a while now and they have always known that they need to offer their publishers and advertisers contextual ads to make the ads more relevant,” said Ajay Sravanapudi, CEO of LucidMedia.
The arrangement, for the first time, will allow Right Media users to contextually categorize their display advertising inventory, using targeted tags for any of Yahoo’s more than 60 vertically focused channels, such as automotive, finance, and sports.
“The channels cover such areas as automotive, careers & jobs, clothing & apparel, finance, sports & recreation and dozens of others.”
“For publishers this offers higher CPMs because it is more valuable to offer context. For advertisers, context is a way to optimize campaigns to increase performance,” added Sravanapudi.
Publishers choosing to make the most out of the newly available contextually targeted advertising tags enable advertisers to more effectively target their inventory, based on relevance to their products or services. The ClickSense deep contextualization engine for advertisers and publishers was developed over nearly a decade to analyze every impression in real-time and determine true meaning of content at the page-level. Today’s announcement follows several months of extensive and successful testing on the Right Media Exchange.
Although it is still in the beginning stage, results from testing have been positive, LucidMedia said.
“We have found that with some of the smaller campaigns, 75% of user response comes from 25% of the media used in the display campaign,” Sravanapudi, said in a statement. “We can consistently identify that 25%. By identifying the waste and buying that 25% through the exchange we can save 50% of media spend.”
“Right Media is clearly a pioneering exchange and we are thrilled to extend the capabilities of our ClickSense contextual targeting engine to the buyers and sellers that do business through it,” said Sravanapudi. “Contextually targeted ads can be considerably more pertinent to users and thus more valuable to publishers, which we believe will ultimately allow advertisers to target their campaigns more effectively and drive improved conversions and return-on-spend.”
Advertisers can also take aim at customers in specific verticals like auto and finance. Sravanapudi said its reporting system gives clients “transparency down to impression levels. We are not aware of any other network that will back up every single impression with proof.”
He added the ClickSense system has a unique method of reading Web copy to more accurately determine whether it belonged in a given category.
“On any of the other exchanges, publishers can tell you, [This is a travel or sports or healthcare page.] But with ClickSense, we can tell you if they are telling the truth,” he said. “If we say a page is about healthcare or breast cancer treatment, we can back it up with data.”
The added layer of comprehension will help keep LucidMedia more competitive in the current economic climate, Sravanapudi predicts. “The problem with many other display networks is that they are not really platforms to be leveraged. There is no real technology behind them – they are relationship based. And if they lose those two or three key people who bring in the clients, it is all over for them.”
Contextual advertising has attracted the attention of advertisers and, as a result, the companies that rely on advertisers for revenue. Microsoft, for example, is reportedly conducting a test to expand its AdCenter engine to allow small publishers to use contextual ads from the software giant. Google, meanwhile, operates AdSense.
“As a network of publishers and advertisers involved in the launch, we have been impressed by the contextual targeting capabilities made available through the Exchange and believe that it will be an important part of our optimization strategy,” said Marc Thomas, Chief Operating Officer of Suite66, an online media company focusing on relevant media planning and buying. “Enabling advertisers to very accurately pinpoint available inventory and target highly relevant ads makes the process more effective and results-focused for everyone involved.”
The partnership comes as Yahoo and its rivals, which rely heavily on ad revenue, face a demanding environment as the economy softens and advertisers pull back. With the agreement, Yahoo is seeking to grab market share from Google and Microsoft.