• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 7, 2011

Most advertising and marketing executives may not have heard about Quality of Service unless they did time in the information technology industry or have geekiness running through their veins. Peer39 CEO Andy Ellenthal wants to change that. 

On Monday, the company will add two distribution channels -- Quality, and Safety -- in an effort to serve up higher-performing ads.

Bringing QoS into the ad-serving industry is something Ellenthal has been talking up to a couple of partners. "Advertisers would like some sort of validation process or stamp from an independent company," he says. "Quality of Service is something we can add into the mix."

Quality and Safety add filters to support where ads serve up. While quality ensures that an ad appears on pages with topic-specific content, Safety keeps them away from alcohol-, drugs- and gambling-related articles or content on a publisher's site.

"Sometimes you will have an ad meant for the U.S. market served on a Portuguese site, which wouldn't provide the best value," Ellenthal says. "We monitor language, type of content such as user-generated, as well as widgets, toolbars, or ad calls."

The categories Quality and Safety were added in response to the growing demand by advertisers to have consistent data attributes on every page. The combination of Peer39's semantic and page analysis technologies work in real-time to give advertisers a standard view across disparate pages of inventory so they can make better bidding decisions.

Peer39 analyzes pages across multiple sources and returns information about each page in less than 10 milliseconds, fast enough to enable real-time bidding. Today, the company serves 2.5 billion to 3 billion ad impressions daily, up from 35 million monthly.

That growth prompted Ellenthal to open two data centers within the past month. There are six in total: three in California, one in Chicago and two on the East Coast. The data centers support fast response times for the real-time bidding platform. The data must process and serve back up to the site in less than five milliseconds so the advertisers can determine whether to bid on the impression.