Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

What might begin to bloom as an online advertising trend for 2008? According to Exponential Interactive Inc., a technology-enabled media services company focused on the online space, users may begin to experience the results of marketers leveraging the store of user data that will be created in the wake of the growth of semantic web-enabled and social services such as Twine, Yoono, and Stumbledupon.com.

The company -- whose businesses include the Tribal Fusion advertising network and EchoTopic, which uses indexing and a very basic semantic component to deduce a web page topic and to suggest relevant ads presented via contextual links -- recently released its list of 2008 advertising trends. The list included the realization of personalization, the coming of age of targeted online videos, new local advertising platforms, better measurements of online campaign effectiveness, the growth of niche virtual worlds -- and the prediction that semantic tools will attract advertising bucks as marketers use semantic analysis to create a more relevant experience for online users.

Exponential's prediction around semantic technology -- as new services begin or continue to drive communities of users who structure and share their online experiences -- is "in all candor, of all our trends, the one that is probably more bleeding-edge," says Alistair Goodman, Exponential VP of strategic marketing, who created the list. "But it just struck me that I'm hearing more and more about it from mainstream, non-technical folks, which is the early indicator of a potential trend."

And it could be a game-changing trend. "If you think about the potential of a number of people being connected through the information they are consuming and the many things they do on line and off line -- that is the leap in terms of where marketing is going," Goodman says. "It needs to connect into that, vs. hitting them over the head with popup or banner ads, which is a very simple way of marketing."

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Goodman says that in the last year sites such as Twine, Yoonoo and del.i.cio.us have started to get a lot of buzz with media buyers and planners -- even if the term "semantic" in and of itself has not. "The uber-trend in online marketing now is that we have so much anonymous user data, and we are much better at building models to use that data to deliver more relevant online marketing experiences to people. This is a treasure trove of data that at some point someone is going to, from a marketing perspective -- because marketers just can't help themselves -- figure out how to leverage," Goodman says.

How? Goodman suggests that marketers might start with the one-percenters, for example -- the active and engaged people in any sector of interest, whether it's stockholding or snowboarding -- to begin to create a community they can leverage to take a compelling idea and grow it in a more viral way, at the same time as they are sharing information with the community.

"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."
"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.