In what company officials call "a real alternative to Google's AdSense," Quigo Technologies Inc. yesterday announced the launch of AdSonar, a contextual advertising solution with Overture as its
premier partner.
According to the announcement, AdSonar enables online publishers and licensees to serve contextually targeted advertising that achieves greater relevancy, reach and revenue for
publishers, licensees and advertisers alike. Along with contextual solutions built "in-house," Overture has licensed Quigo's AdSonar, and will combine their solution with AdSonar's powerful, dynamic
capabilities.
AdSonar uses proprietary semantic algorithms to automatically identify, match and deliver the most relevant ads to each particular content page. For example, a web page featuring a
travel article about Hawaii could offer advertising for hotels in Hawaii, airlines flying to Hawaii, unique tourist attractions in Hawaii and more. One advantage of AdSonar is in giving publishers the
option of a human editorial setup for defining relevancy parameters and 'teaching' Quigo's machine learning algorithms which parts of each page should be targeted. The human editing process ensures
that only the relevant parts of each document are targeted for ads, significantly improving the relevancy of the results.
"From the first soap opera to product placement in movies and TV
programming, advertisers have searched for contextually relevant vehicles to market their products. Contextually targeted advertising solutions like Quigo's are the holy grail for advertisers", said
Tom Hespos, president of New York agency Underscore Marketing.
Online contextual advertising is part of the fast growing search engine marketing industry, which experienced growth of 275% in 2001
and 325% in 2002 to $927.4 million in the US, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. "We believe online search engine marketing will continue its impressive growth, possibly exceeding an
estimated $7 billion in 2007 worldwide revenues, and contextual advertising, although in very early stage, is one of the fastest growing new segments within this industry," says U.S. Bancorp Piper
Jaffray senior research analyst Safa Rashtchy. "Through its technology and now this relationship with Overture, Quigo has established a solid presence in this industry."
According to industry
estimates, contextual advertising could reach $2 billion within five years.