Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Expert System USA, the developers of Cogito Monitor, has released Cogito Semantic Advertiser, a tool aimed at big media houses and publications, which automatically processes the meaning of text to ensure ads are placed on relevant Web pages.

The Cogito Language Technology Platform of semantic intelligence, the engine behind the tool, ensures that ads are placed appropriately to increase click-through rates, by automatically analyzing Web pages to identify the most relevant topics and extracting the main themes included in the text. According to the company, the tool classifies content by assigning the category related to the text in real time, based on an optimized taxonomy and high precision. It collects all useful data in an output format structured to be easily uploaded into a database; and directly integrates with the ad server, enabling the selection and serving of the most relevant ads for the Web page. Expert says its technology processes the page and the ad as they are created and stores the semantic results in a database, so the real test of performance is from a database perspective; if the database is configured correctly, processing can take considerably less than two seconds.

Are advertisers starting to ponder the effectiveness of current ad-serving techniques, which tend to rely on keyword frequency to place ad copy without considering the meaning? As an example, Cogito notes that that approach could lead to having an ad for a Caribbean vacation package inadvertently appear near an article about a massive hurricane that recently hit that region. Users reading about that event are unlikely to be in the market to vacation in that area. But that same ad placed next to a story about a particular resort in the Caribbean, or tropical cocktails, or even expectations for a freezing winter, should do much better.

"We do know that as little as a 5 percent improvement in the connectedness between ads and content improves click rates by as much as 50 percent," says Expert's CEO Brooke Aker. That should increase the ad's ability to generate profits.

Expert also talks about the tool's ability to make socio-cultural correlations for ad placement -- determining that a user interested in high-end wines, for example, is a person who is also likely to be interested in fine dining -- and using that data to help advertisers reach these new customers.

"For an example of how an advertiser can leverage the socio-cultural correlations for ad placement, consider that a person interested in organic food is likely to be interested in buying an ecological car," says Aker. "This is because studies in social behaviour have proven that an interest in healthy diets and a concern with ecology tend to be shared, in most cases, by the same types of people. These relations are not direct, yet they are incisive and effective, and they could not be discovered nor applied by other technologies."

Aker also notes that companies that use Expert's Cogito Monitor tool, which uses the vendor's semantic smarts to help advertisers understand what customers are saying online about their products, can leverage that in conjunction with Cogito Semantic Advertiser to help in campaigns. "Trends and connections between products and socio-economic groups or socio-demographic groups are revealed by Monitor and can be engineered into the target audiences of Advertiser during ad design time," Aker says.

Cogito Semantic Advertiser is available in Italian and English now. Germany is on the way and other languages are very possible, Aker says.

"For example, our core technology covers Arabic and another Middle Eastern language. We are looking at French and Chinese currently," he says. Expert System plans to sell Cogito Semantic Advertiser in the $100,000 to $200,000 range, depending on implementation size requirements.