Today Peer39 and Brandscreen announced a partnership to provide real-time semantic targeting to media buyers in the APAC region. Phil Cowlishaw, Performance Media Director of Ikon Communications, and Andy Ellenthal, CEO of Peer39, discuss page relevancy, brand safety and the plans to make the technology available in other APAC languages.

EW: You mentioned in bid decisions that gaining access to page level attributes ‘unlocks the true value and context of each available impression’, can you explain the impact of page relevancy on real time audience buying in more detail?

PC: Understanding page level attributes provides us with valuable new insights into where our ads are being served and the overall performance of each placement. The Peer39 integration will enable us to make bid and buy decisions on 3 key page level attributes: Quality, Safety and Category. These attributes are passed from the supply source and enable us to define the environment of the page that our ads could potentially appear on for each individual impression.

Page attributes can work in tandem with user based targeting to ensure the page is an environment that is conducive to the brand, product or creative message of the advertises. Semantically classified pages in advertiser-focused categories and sub-categories, give additional visibility into where ads are showing. This enables us to ensure that we are putting the right message to the right user in a high quality environment where they will be most likely to engage with our client’s campaigns.

Understanding the content and makeup of the page that builds the overall environment is critical for optimization of media schedules. AdCalls, Homepages, text/image ratio, the number of ads on the page can all be taken into account to understand the quality of the page and deliver signals for optimization. These new insights provide us with valuable new optimization opportunities to drive increased efficiencies for our client’s media spends.

EW: How will the ‘brand safety’ promise drive more brand spend through ad trading desks and exchanges?

PC: Each advertiser has unique requirements when it comes to brand safety and page quality. For most advertisers, it is about avoiding inappropriate content for the target audience or their brand. While for others, excluding content that is not relevant for the campaign or creative executions is critical. Page level categorization enables us to define what is safe and of the right quality for each of our individual clients media campaigns objectives.

Safety attributes allow us to pre-emptively target away from content that might be detrimental to the brand or campaign, without having to bid on or buy it in advance. Page level attributes across three key channels, Quality, Safety and Category are taken into consideration, resulting in brands messages being aligned with the most relevant, brand safe content on the web.

We anticipate that the ability to align brands with quality, contextually relevant content. Delivering targeted messaging at scale in the most cost effective manner possible, will result in an influx of brand budgets into the exchange marketplace.

EW: Will Peer 39 look to extend its offering into other local languages in the APAC region e.g. Chinese, Japanese?

AE: We built our technology to be the most nimble, accurate and scalable in the industry, especially in delivering page level intelligence for every page in RTB. Only Peer39 provides category, quality and safety attributes for literally billions of pages every day. Early on our vision was that our data would be included in every ad buy in RTB, delivering huge value and performance – while remaining consumer-friendly and safe for brands. We planned for ubiquity, and therefore we made software design decisions and large infrastructure investments to enable support of multi-language capability.

With the traction we’ve seen, as evidenced by our latest partnership with Brandscreen, our approach has powerful validation in the market. When Brandscreen chose Peer39, it was exciting for us not only for the opportunity to work closely with a great team and market leader, but because it opens a whole new geographic market for us. The companies that will win at this game must be ahead of industry trends, and I believe that Brandscreen’s forward-thinking helped drive their choice of Peer39 for its environmental targeting and brand safety solution. To be clear, environment covers everything from the structure of the page (ad calls, toolbars/widgets, content rich environment) to page topic (Arts & Entertainment, Finance) to safety attributes (mature, safe from hate speech). Our solution raises the value of RTB overall for buyers and sellers.

When we say all web pages, we mean – obviously – not just in English. Regarding the expansion of our offering, this partnership puts into play the massive opportunity to branch out into other languages in APAC and share benefits of Peer39’s page level intelligence. We fully expect that to extend our solution in languages such as Chinese and Japanese as dictated by market demand and business needs. For us it’s a natural path of our technological capabilities and company goals, so keep on the lookout for more announcements.

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