Semantics Will Be The Power Behind the Ads

“This idea [that with semantic technologies] that I can plan a trip to North Africa on the web, having researched it for several months, and when my friend goes a few months later I can share this information with that person, and they can share it with100 other people who can add to it and enrich it -- the ability to do that so quickly and so easily now is what marketers are trying to harness and access.”

And they can leverage the data to deliver further on the promise of one-to-one marketing, customizing the experience delivered to users. To use an example of what’s already out there today, Exponential’s EchoTopic can via an XML feed stream the most up-to-date advertiser information to a user, based on the topic of the page being viewed, directly into an ad from the advertiser’s back end database. “It’s harnessing all of that,” says Goodman -- and more.

Is privacy a concern? Always. “At the end of the day, marketing needs to be seen as a valuable tool to the users, in order for them to accept more of it in their lives. Any pushback may have to do with the fact that we, as marketers, aren’t making the experience as relative as we could, and privacy boundaries always need to be very closely adhered to,” he says.

The problem comes if marketers enthralled with the power of semantics cross the boundaries to do explicit and heavy marketing based on detailed preferences and information that they may uncover.

“But if you suggest something -- maybe subtly in the text about whether you want to learn more about something that you’re already consuming a lot of media about -- that’s well within the bounds,” Goodman says.