The "Engagement" Network

As ad networks continue to be criticized for their lack of quality, they'll need to combat this generalization in order to stay afloat. I've seen a number of ways that ad networks attempt to portray quality in the mid-long tail, but in the last couple weeks I've noticed many networks turning to "engagement" as their quality measurement. I've gotten used to hearing aspects like transparency, reach, targetability and time spent as value propositions, but engagement is new to me.

First, I think it's necessary to define engagement. Today, I read an article published in Adotas that defined engagement rather nicely: "the communication between a brand and its customer, a brand and its potential customer or between two customers. Put simply, for engagement to happen, there must be some back and forth between folks. A comment on a photo or blog post, the sharing of a widget ad, the submission of a photo or video into a contest or the emailing of a coupon to a friend are all great examples of engagement in advertising."

Through all my discussions with ad networks, I've found one in particular that truly captures the essence of engagement. Kontera, an in-text ad network, who has developed an innovative in-text technology called ContentLink that truly brings engagement into online advertising. Since Kontera received funding from Sequoia Capital in 2006, they've been able take their contextual targeting technology to the forefront of the in-text world.

Kontera's technology is unmatched by competing in-text providers. Some of the relevancy features include:

• Editorial analysis based on principles of computational linguistics in a way that mimics human intent: Which means that the technology actually reads the page and can tell the difference between Apple Computers and Apple Juice.


• Enables real-time analysis of static or dynamic content: Which means that when content on publisher pages change so will the relevant ad.


• The process is self learning and optimizing based off real time consumer behavior data analytics: Which means that the technology will recognize which keywords on what sites consumers are responding well to.

This kind of relevancy in targeting brings the consumer a level of engagement that they aren't unaccustomed to experiencing. Now a consumer can be reading about tax preparation and opt into an ad from HR Block. What's special about in-text advertising, is that the user must scroll over the underlined link in order to receive the ad. This means that readers must actually want to see the ad in order for it to be served. In addition to serving consumers contextually relevant ads, Kontera's Hybrid product will also aggregate other articles from within the publisher's site, or across the web, to give the consumer other relevant content that they might be intersted in.

This Hybrid product acts as a user and publisher benefiting engagement tool. Publishers have the opportunity to capitalize on additional revenue, increase page views, and become THE source for quality editorial content. On the other hand, consumers can now read what they want, be served additional editorial content that is relevant to what they want to read about, receive advertising that pertains to what they're engaged in and lastly, decide whether or not they want to scroll over the underlined keywords to receive all this relevant content.

The article in Adotas defines engagement as "A communication between a brand and its customer." Kontera is the facilitator of the conversation that readers wants to have with the brand. If I was a media planner buying for Iron Man (the movie), I'd want my 30 second video trailer, website, movie ticket link and theatre locator to pop up every time Robert Downy Jr.'s name shows up on popular publisher sites.

With Kontera's products and services, engagement is not an added bonus, it's their business.