Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Online ad network and digital marketing technology provider Ad Pepper Media is rolling out in the U.S. iSense Display, one of the pieces of its semantically enabled iSense network. The network matches display advertising content to remnant inventory based on category-targeted opportunities.

The additional piece of the iSense network, SiteScreen, which enables brand-safe advertising, is due to roll out later this year in the U.S. Both already are available in the U.K.

The solution has its origins in Dr. David Crystal's work. The author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and about 100 other works, Crystal founded Crystal Semantics to devise a data model based on pure linguistics science rather than mathematical approaches of how to classify a web or content page based on the true sense of all the words on the page.

"If you understand the potential sense of all the words on the page, you can disambiguate the sense of the whole page and define the true sense and theme," says Sacha Carton, director of product & technology development and director of the board at Ad Pepper Media.

iSense is based on Crystal's Sense Engine semantic analysis technology, which Carton describes as the world's largest linguistic scientific project ever undertaken, comprising ten years of research and development and the man-hours of 40 lexicographers who made their way through the 300,000 most meaningful of the million words in the English language and mapped out every potential sense (an average of three) for each word.

"The true distinguishing factor with iSense is that we are based 100 percent on a linguistic science project that does not aim to have algorithmic views on text to somehow extract the sense mathematically," says Carton. "It is the closest thing to a human-based targeting approach whereby lexicographers have gone and built a classification model that is patented and seeks to replicate the same cognitive processes you'd go through when reading a page to define what it's about."

It includes taxonomy of slightly over 3,000 categories. Ad Pepper Media acquired Crystal Semantics in 2006 and integrated its technology into a scalable ad server engine to support content targeting of display advertising following its acquisition of a free audience measurement network with 1 million sites worldwide that it converted into an ad network.

"More and more content is being generated and less and less sense is being made," says Carton. More content means more advertising opportunities, but these fail to be optimally exploited. Most content providers have between 30 and 70 percent of unsold, or remnant, inventory, he says. iSense Display can convert this into a category targeting opportunity; it gets deployed across the content provider's network, analyzes the content, attributes a semantic category to each remnant inventory page so Ad Pepper's sales force can sell category based ads that run in parallel to the content provider's own branded sales efforts.

When a user visits an iSense enabled web page, a call is made to the iSense engine, the page is classified in one of the 3,000 content categories, and it becomes available to an ad server to deliver an ad matching that context. The page gets passed back to the publisher if it doesn't match a particular advertiser's requirements, so that it is free to pass onto the next advertiser.

Ad Pepper has run over 200 campaigns since last January for blue chip advertisers including T-Mobile, which wanted to generate interest in its G1 by targeting content related to technology gadgets, electronics, and so on. Carton says the iSense network has achieved click through rate yield increases of between 50 to 700 percent over the duration of the campaigns it runs, based on the engine's ability to get granular page level views for each campaign. Carton says it's been very interesting to use the engine to optimize against the client's original categorical objectives for ads. In some cases, he says, ads don't always work in what might seem to be an obvious category, and the engine provides a great way to discover new lower level categories that might work better for a client.

"Sometimes we're a little bit surprised to see where things work and don't work," he says. "As clients come back to renew their budgets, we reapply that learning so we don't to start from as far down as in the previous campaign. So each client ends up with a custom semantic channel that works for that particular campaign."

When SiteScreen launches in the States later this year, it will address the issue of ensuring that ads don't want up placed next to content the advertiser considers objectionable. Ad Pepper has been garnering awards for both technologies, including two British digital innovation awards in the past year, organised by E-Consultancy and the IAB, and a silver medal at the European Seal of e-Excellence Awards, which reward digital media companies for industry-leading innovation.