Matching ads with patterns, not keywords

Contextual ad company Proximic has announced big news. Not only has it scored an ad inventory to die for, but it’s also put a new spin on contextual advertising.

by Helen Leggatt

The figures are impressive. Proximic’s new brand of contextual advertising has led to deals with both Yahoo Shopping and eBay’s Shopping.com. In total, Proximic will garner 50 million ads – 20 million each from Yahoo and eBay and another 10 million from other sources.

But what’s so special about Proximic’s contextual-matching engine? For starters it doesn’t rely on keywords, instead it uses a method called “proximity analysis”.

“Proximity analysis” looks at patterns – whether it looks at one word, two words, 15 words or a complete page, said Thomas Nitsche, the engine’s architect and 1984 World Computer Chess Champion.

“We look at patterns of letters. We get a profile. The profile is a vector. We compare two vectors, and compute proximity by pattern distance. We can generate proximity between texts,” explained Nitsche.

Another bonus is that this unique pattern-matching technique can be used in any language. So far, two large publishers have already signed on – The Independent, one of the U.K.’s largest dailies and Nature Publishing Group.

Tags: contectual advertising, online advertising, proximity analysis, search marketing