• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 10, 2011

Always looking for innovative technology that brands can use to interact with consumers, the GroupM company M80 will develop an offering, tapping Kontera's audience-engagement engine Synapse.

Combining contextual targeting with social marketing -- where advertisers pay for hyperlinked keywords in an article or blog post -- makes Kontera interesting, according to M80 President Jeff Semones. Clicking on the word takes users to an advertiser's landing page or connects them to a social network that promotes products or services.

"It's our responsibility as our client's social agency to uncover the latest technology platforms and technologies driving engagement," he said. "Kontera's technology makes branded content discoverable."

Kontera found that contextual ads linked to social content have an engagement rate of 37%, compared with 26% for those that do not.

Axe, for example, used Kontera to drive consumers to the YouTube-posted video "Even Angels Will Fall." Verizon used sponsored spokesperson Indy race car driver Will Power's Twitter stream, which posts a photo of him in a shirt standing next to a car that sports a Verizon logo.

Aside from contextual ads, location-based services remain on the list of forthcoming options that M80 continues to test today. "We're seeing good returns on investment, but as smartphones start to proliferate, going from 30% penetration to 50%, it will enable many more types of location-based promotions," he said.

Social media campaigns impact search result pages, especially since Google integrated the influence of social signals in search results, and implemented Google Panda to reward original content. Making social content more discoverable makes search engine marketing more important.

Semones also points to Zemanta, a new platform for accelerating online content production for Web users. Any user-created blog post, article or Web page is directly by Zemanta's technology to recognize tags and contextual content. Zemanta combs relevant images across the Web, linking words, text and images, serving up the results to complement the content.