Mar 25, 2010 Author Gavin Dunaway
ADOTAS – Seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry (even a Sue or two) is introducing a brand protection service. Even as brand dollars increasingly flock to the display market and agency and networks seek verification solutions, the brand protection market is becoming a crowded field.
How does a company differentiate? By integrating brand protection with your core offering — or rather making it a logical extension.
Launched today, Proximic’s brand protection is essentially an expansion of its contextualization and audience targeting capabilities. Altogether, the integrated services make for a cost-efficient service for networks, agencies and other players across the spectrum.
“We call it the carrot and stick approach,” says CEO Philipp Pieper. “The stick is singling out pages that you don’t want to feature brand advertisements on and the carrot is identifying the useful pages and users you want to target against.”
He admits that Proximic was sort of dragged into the brand protection arena by its clients — once you do contextualization for audience targeting, you might as well do brand protection. However, the mechanism for brand protection actually enabled the contextualization service to be more real-time and versatile in other languages. The solution can also be used to certify, monitor and classify network inventory.
At Proximic’s core is a language-independent search technology for contextual matching that allows it to evade linguistics, allowing for stellar testing in one of the most difficult language markets: China. One of the initial guinea pigs was Taoboa, China’s largest e-retailer platform that also includes an ad exchange and an affiliate network.
The company focused almost entirely on China because of the huge language challenges that stymie similar companies. China is a more challenging market than the U.S. with more dynamic pages and higher volume combined with a lower-value advertising ecosystem. Proximic was surprised to see how well the technology performed, actually surpassing the expectations of the clients testing it out.
Pieper believes agencies and networks will seek out brand protection this year, but after that the initial thrill, they’ll contemplate how to truly merge the service into their infrastructure, looking for technology platforms that offer multiple services such as contextualization, audience targeting and brand protection.
“Effectively brand protection is a cost issue when everyone is out to make more revenue, and that’s what we’re trying to facilitate with the rest of the services on top,” he says.