Amplify, the meaning platform, has launched a web service to bring a human understanding of content to online advertising. In addition to improving the performance and accountability of display advertising and increasing the value of content for online publishers,

Amplify enables social media to effectively monetize their traffic without impacting the user experience. Amplify’s unique computational linguistic technology mimics the process of human understanding to automatically extract the meaning of text in digital content such as web pages and blogs.

By surfacing the significant topics, attitudes and pending decisions within any text, it removes the guesswork from brand safety and targeting decisions. Unlike existing tools that rely on categorizing content according to keywords or assessing brand safety based on samples of content, Amplify is able to automatically scan all content to provide the online advertising community with a full appreciation of the meaning of the text.

“This is the missing part of the jigsaw – until now, online advertising has relied on making assumptions based on very limited data,” comments Mark Redgrave, CEO at Amplify. “Existing classification techniques such as keyword or statistical analysis provide only half the story as they’re unable to capture the actual meaning. Amplify can now do this – not just accurately but also on a massive scale.”

While the industry is under increasing pressure to improve the value and accountability of online advertising, the rapid growth in social media has made it extremely difficult to accurately assess and target content. Publishers now have much less control over their content while ad networks and ad servers are finding it more and more difficult to provide complete transparency around where an advertiser’s brand is placed. In addition, social networking and user generated content (UGC) sites are struggling to effectively monetise their sites without impacting the user experience and deterring traffic.

“The lack of brand-safety is one of the biggest challenges social networking and video sharing web sites face in attracting brand advertisers,” comments Caroline Dangson, research analyst for IDC’s Digital Marketplace program. “Amplify’s technology promises to change all this – offering a solution to ensure brand-safety of web content for advertisers in a way that has not been available previously. This changes the outlook for the social media advertising market.”

“While these sites are highly attractive destinations for advertisers, as they provide an opportunity to connect with users like never before, effective targeting requires a far greater understanding of the content in order to improve relevance,” continues Redgrave. “Ultimately, Amplify can improve targeting to such as extent that advertising doesn’t feel like advertising any more, it feels like a service.”

Using Amplify’s web service, online publishers, ad networks and social networks can build bespoke solutions to suit their particular marketing, sales or content management requirements. Amplify is currently undergoing trials with leading ad networks and publishers.

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