Peer39 has been following through on new CEO Andy Ellenthal’s intent to forge more relationships between the semantic advertising vendor and those in the demand side and ad exchange space: Today it’s integrating its semantic targeting technology with the AppNexus real-time ad bidding platform that is used by ad networks, DSPs and trading desks.

AppNexus’ perch atop so many different inventory sources (it offers single-point integration to the largest sources of inventory, including ad exchanges like Google’s DoubleClick and Microsoft’s AdECN) is one reason the deal is significant for Peer39.

It follows a June deal Peer39 made with yield optimization platform AdMeld for helping its demand partners (including ad networks, exchanges, and DSPs) use Peer39′s semantic technology to create appropriate matches with web content by leveraging meaning- and sentiment- analysis, for higher-value impressions.

“The where part of where exchange-based ads run may not be as sexy as some of the audience data that’s available, but it’s incredibly important for both brand advertisers and direct response advertisers,” Ellenthal says. “What I like about the AppNexus integration is that you can leverage both the relevancy of content and the audience data that’s available.” So pairing content understanding and audience data means that instead of doing a run of network you are actually able to do a run of parenting the kids or run of automotive, for example, he says. “There’s enough scale in this implementation and with their inventory, where from a buyer’s perspective you can cherry pick the right type of content and the right type of audience.”

Reliance on audience data alone, Ellenthal says, hasn’t delivered enough scale to move the display advertising needle for trading desks and agencies. The expectations that it would might have been somewhat unrealistic, he thinks – content matters in the equation, because the right audience tends to aggregate around the right type of quality information. It’s too often forgotten in the online advertising world that one of the main reasons the audience an advertiser wants came to a certain web page is because of relevant and ideally robust (and brand-safe) content, he says. Only when you can have the advertising message in line with that does the likelihood dramatically grow that the reader will respond positively to brand advertising or direct response solicitations.

“What we see is when you buy semantically vs. just run of network you see a 50 to 200 percent increase on click rates. And when you overlay audience data on top of that, you see even greater performance,” he says. “So it’s additive and it’s complementary, and we bring to the table a tremendous amount of volume. We’re classifying roughly about 1 billion-plus ad impressions a day.”

He doesn’t expect to see serious competition for what Peer39 does anytime soon: “It’s challenging to do what we do from a semantic perspective,” he says, “but more challenging to be able to do it at the type of scale and with the type of response times we need to for real time bidding.”

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