- ClickZ, Friday, April 7, 2006 10:46 AM
Sometimes news is like the weather in that it's not always good. When the weather is bad, contextual advertising can be a problem for vertical category marketers. Take the U.S. automotive industry,
which if you've been reading any news, you know has been going through a slump. While the news media blasts carmakers for the woeful state of their industry, citing factors like high oil prices and
sinking demand, auto makers have increasingly turned their marketing focus to the Web for more accountable advertising. Say you're an automaker and you buy into a contextual network and your ads show
up next to an article about the hapless state of the auto industry. Suddenly, you're a not-so-happy advertiser, and there's not much you can do, either. The problem with contextual networks is they
run ads against content channels, using automated programs to place ads. They don't check to see what the content is about, and most won't disclose to marketers a complete list of where they place
your ads. What's a marketer to do about the dynamic nature of content? Some contextual networks, like ContextWeb, address this problem by adding algorithms that analyze various parameters. ContextWeb
pegs a relevance ranking to each page by analyzing the number of times certain words are repeated and placing them into buckets. If the quantity of negative words in relation to other words is higher,
an article receives a lower ranking for a particular category than others. "If an article is about a plane crash, for example, words like 'plane crash,' 'ambulance,' and 'death,' will rank higher
than words like 'travel,' 'hotels,' and 'holiday,' said one executive.
Read the whole story at ClickZ »
