Peer39 announced this week that is making its semantic targeting solution available in a number of European languages. Here Andy Ellenthal, CEO, Peer39, discusses the multi-lingual offerings now available in Europe, and how it will help European display buyers.
Can you give an overview of the new multi-lingual offering from Peer39? What languages does your solution now cover?
Peer39 is known for surfacing its page level information in 3 channels: category, safety and quality. Because this data is so foundational to RTB, when we built our solution we made a deliberate effort to bake in the scale required to support multi-languages. Today we are processing over 10 billion impressions daily. We fully expect that number to increase substantially with our expansion into the EU. In addition to English, Peer39 now offers page level intelligence on Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch content. Going forward, Peer39 will continue expanding into more languages based on client requirements, providing advertisers the data necessary to place their ads in the most relevant and effective page environments.
How will this help buyers in the European market?
Our multi-language support helps buyers in Europe in numerous ways. First, while there are concerns that the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive will reduce the amount of available inventory for behavioral targeting, Peer39’s solution could not have come at a better time. We provide actionable targeting information on virtually any page. As the questions of cookie usage continue to be raised, we expect European buyers will clamor for data solutions like Peer39 that adhere to the most stringent, consumer-friendly privacy standards. Secondly, our language support will enable business expansion throughout the EU. With Peer39, buyers can offer clients a “one-stop shop” approach to ad buys. That means that the buyers will derive more value and efficiency as the need to work with various inventory sources in so many countries is diminished. Peer39 data provides the foundational data for buyers that will enable expansion into numerous geographic areas in the coming months.
Can you give some overview of the Peer39 solution, and how it differs from rival offerings in the marketplace?
In order to handle the scale and multi-language we built our solution based on Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms. Machine learning is scalable, fast turn-around and accurate. In contrast, other offerings use a linguistic approach that is labor intensive and requires significant work per language for expansion, and requires tremendous effort to maintain. Language on the internet is ever changing and the solutions should be able to adjust and adapt to these changes, and the only solution to do it is a statistical approach. It is one thing to be able to analyze a page in a vacuum; it’s quite another to be able to support the scale of RTB and response times required. There are some competitors in the field but none come close to our speed, scale, and accuracy. Plus Peer39’s business and technology approach are protected by several patents, so we possess significant and defensible competitive advantages.
How would a buyer use your technology? Is it an extra targeting variable within the DSP or SSP? And how do you charge for the semantic targeting solution?
Yes, Peer39 works with a number Publishers, Exchanges, SSPs and DSPs, many of which are operating in the EU today. Buyers can target their campaigns to (or away from) any of the variables in each of our channels: Category, Safety and Quality.
Category: Peer39 semantically classifies pages in advertiser-focused categories and sub-categories, giving universal visibility into where ads are showing. Our taxonomy is fully actionable and scalable, and was built with advertisers in mind and in consultation with emerging industry standards.
Quality: Quality content is determined by many factors that are unique to each advertiser and campaign. Peer39’s quality attributes provide information on the type of content and structure of a page that add to the overall environment around the ad unit. Ad calls, UGC, widget/toolbar: these are kinds of critical attributes that Peer39 provides buyers in real time.
Safety: Brand Safety can mean many things to different advertisers. Some advertisers want to avoid content that may be objectionable or inappropriate or for their audience. Others may want to simply avoid content that is misaligned, or doesn’t meet the objectives of the campaign or creative execution. Peer39 lets buyers know which topics are addressed at the page level, leaving the job of deciding what is “safe” and “unsafe” up to the advertiser.
The price of this targeting is most often determined by the platform through which the advertiser chooses to access our data.
Is Peer39 integrated with the leading DSPs and SSPs in the European market?
Yes. We have not yet officially announced throughout Europe, but we are currently integrated with the largest DSPs and SSPs. We work closely with our partners to provide Peer39’s data at scale in the EU. In addition, have numerous partnerships in the pipeline, so keep on the lookout for more announcements in the coming months.
Given our recent cookie-tracking issues here in Europe, how important do you think semantic-targeting will be for European media-buyers?
I can answer that in one word: Essential. Moving forward, as l referenced earlier, the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive has the potential to throw a real monkey wrench in the growth of RTB. Non-cookie based targeting solutions will become the go-to solution for media buyers going forward. However, privacy laws notwithstanding, our perspective is that other forms of data in RTB while effective, can be challenged in delivering the scale a display media campaign requires. Rather our approach ushers in a whole new way of doing business online. Peer39 is to display what Adsense is to text ads but even greater. For while Adsense only exists in the Google environment (either the search engine result page or in the Google publisher network), Peer39 is genuinely ubiquitous. We work with all players in RTB as the integral, foundational data source that provides topic, quality and safety attributes for every page in RTB. And we do it really fast, with great accuracy, at massive scale – and really affordably. In our vision, our data will be included in every ad buy in RTB (like inferred data) while delivering huge value and performance (like behavioral), but in a way that is consumer-friendly and safe for brands.