Late last year news broke that CBS was dumping third-party ad networks in favor of launching its own internal ad network. Its hopes are to better monetize its online inventory – if not immediately at least over time. That’s good news for semantic advertising startups such as Peer39, whose founder and CEO Amiad Solomon will be one of the featured presenters at a panel at WebMediaBrands’ upcoming Web 3.0 conference.

“What CBS has done -- and others will follow -- is bring more control back to its content,” says Solomon. Peer39 would be quite happy if other big publishers with brand name properties came to the same conclusion, as Newsweek did when it adopted Peer39’s technology in May. Their content “is worth a lot of money and advertisers should pay to be there. Publishers with big brands want to see more coming out of these entities.”

Such moves won’t spell the end of third-party ad networks, which also can subscribe to Peer39’s technology. Most smaller content providers without the deep pockets and clout of a CBS or Newsweek still will need to leverage these platforms to unload inventory. Not every content source can claim, for example, the 60 million unique visitors a month CBS attracts, according to ComScore, nor do they have the sales forces to support direct interaction. That said, even CBS said it will continue working with some exchanges (Yahoo's Right Media Exchange, Google's DoubleClick, and Publicis Groupe unit Vivaki's Audience on Demand). “They just want to get a fair value price for these pages,” says Solomon.

Semantic data can maximize the value of publishers’ pages’ content. Peer39, for example, enables publishers to get dashboard graphs, statistical breakdowns, suggestions and predictive functions related to content categories to which ads can be matched, and to see high-yielding content categories along with those that are not performing well.

Going Real-Time
As Solomon looks ahead to the 2010 trends that are likely to be discussed at the Semantic Advertising panel he’ll be speaking at this month at the Web 3.0 conference, he sees an intensifying emphasis on data across the spectrum of players in the advertising chain. That includes the emerging class of demand-side platforms (DSPs), which connect to multiple ad exchanges and other inventory sources and use advanced analysis of data to understand the value of impressions before a buy is made. “There will be a big blast in 2010” around leveraging data points and understanding how to work with them in real time, Solomon predicts.

“The biggest advertisers want to send the right message at the right time to the right person in real time,” he says. “The second half of this year we saw a lot of real-time bidding systems developed that let advertisers decide if they want to put an ad on a specific page or not. The decisions are made in a millisecond. That whole notion is becoming very efficient. And data is the crucial piece there. Without data you can’t participate in this game.”

Lacking data or the knowledge of how to leverage it, your competitors win, he says. In Peer39’s case, the insight its technology provides includes data for better targeting ads to content by understanding the correlation between keywords on the page and between sentences on the page, but also for protecting brands by avoiding matches to negative content and sentiment. Says Solomon, “Everyone needs more revenue and sales and semantic advertising is the way to generate that.”