Kontera Introduces Its New Relevance and Audience Engagement Engine

Kontera Synapse is launched along with Engagement Pricing and PerformancePLUS Service; Kontera Synapse delivers five times the brand lift of traditional display advertising and supports a new class of In-Text related-search applications

SAN FRANCISCO – Kontera, the leading provider of In-Text Advertising and Related Information solutions, announced Kontera Synapse, its next-generation In-Text relevance engine. Kontera Synapse makes the most relevant associations for end users, by identifying their topics of interest and predicting intent. For advertisers, Kontera Synapse massively aggregates and engages the most qualified audience from across the web. The technology has been shown by comScore to deliver advertiser performance that’s five times greater than traditional display advertising. Kontera Synapse’s new topical-targeting capabilities also provide a platform for a new class of related information and related search applications.

Kontera also announced two complementary capabilities for attaining superior brand engagement and campaign results. The company introduced Cost Per View (CPV) pricing and PerformancePLUS, a continuous optimization capability that boosts both brand awareness and direct response campaigns by as much as 20 to 30 percent.

ComScore studied the advertiser performance characteristics of Kontera Synapse engine over a three-month period, and released those findings today.

“Kontera In-Text advertising had a significant impact throughout the purchasing funnel,” said Graham Mudd, Vice President of Search & Media at comScore. “When compared to the comScore norms for display advertising, Kontera delivered five times as much brand awareness lift and twice as much brand purchase-intent lift. Furthermore, when we examined our consumer panel’s behavior, we saw that three weeks after being exposed to Kontera’s in-text ads, they were 400% more likely to search online for the promoted products and 2.5 times as many exposed panelists visited the product information pages.”

These results were attained through the breakthrough innovations of Kontera Synapse:

Topical targeting – Prior to Kontera Synapse, all In-Text technologies relied on fixed keyword lists for campaign targeting. With topical targeting Kontera is able to identify thousands of concepts and expanded phrases that are relevant to the topics of interest of any advertiser’s target audience. This provides greater campaign scale and selection of phrases and keywords that are more engaging to consumers.

For example: Topical targeting allows automotive advertisers to expand from simplistic phrases, like “car performance,” to much more relevant phrases like “the exhilaration of exceptional cornering.”
Dynamic ‘A/B’ optimization – Kontera Synapse tests different topics and monitors how users interact with each page on the Kontera’s network in real-time. The In-Text phrases with which end users interact more represent users’ interests. In this way intent is determined through “the voice of the users.”
Phrase Discovery and Exploration – Kontera Synapse automatically identifies and tracks the trending of new phrases, as they appear across the network. Those phrases are cross linked to relevant topics and entities (people, places, etc.).
Comprehensive brand safety controls – Synapse includes a full suite of brand safety capabilities. Advertisers benefit from Kontera’s knowledge of sensitive topics and keywords within each category. In addition, specific ‘avoid’ lists can be defined for an advertiser or specific campaigns. These controls ensure that advertisers are not proximate to content that is harmful to their brand.
“Kontera Synapse culminates an intensive R&D investment throughout the past two years,” said Yoav Shaham, Kontera’s CEO. “With topical targeting we link concepts and phrases that manual keyword lists alone have no chance at identifying. Our related information and related search offerings deliver results that are more relevant to users’ intent. For advertisers we offer a much more qualified and engaged audience, at scale.”

New Engagement Pricing:

Kontera also introduced new Cost Per View pricing for brand advertisers whose campaign goals focus on engagement and awareness using video campaigns. The Cost Per View pricing model augments Kontera’s cost per click model. It allows brand advertisers to pay for qualified engagements, which in the case of many awareness campaigns may be a more important goal then clicks. Kontera’s platform has proven to be an exceptional performer for brand lift and product awareness, and traditional brand and TV advertisers have been clamoring for In-Text Cost Per View pricing.

New PerformancePLUS campaign optimization:

Kontera’s PerformancePLUS campaign optimization service provides advertisers with an additional boost that increases results for both brand engagement or direct response campaigns by as much as 30%. Campaigns are continuously improved through an on-going optimization of topics used, improving phrase selections, ad unit mix, and placement across the network. The result is a noticeable increase in end-user engagement throughout the life of the campaign. For action-oriented objectives like online registrations, online purchases, or the completion of referral forms, Kontera is able to monitor the back-end results and to boost performance to those metrics by 20 to 30%.

This story was originally reported on by Laurie Sullivan of Mediapost.

About Kontera

Kontera delivers the most relevant In-Text Advertising & Related Information solutions online. Kontera’s patented technology performs real-time semantic analysis of content and other information to dynamically hyper-link the terms that most accurately represent and predict user-intent and engagement. Kontera enhances consumer experience through superior phrase relevance, driving increased user interaction, unparalleled campaign performance for advertisers, and substantial revenue for publishers. Reaching more than 140 million unique users per month, Kontera’s exclusive network features over 15,000 vetted premium and niche publishers and represents a unique opportunity for advertisers to reach their target audiences through innovative text, rich media and video advertising units. Founded in 2003, Kontera is backed by Sequoia Capital, Carmel Ventures and Tenaya Capital and has offices in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, London and Tel Aviv. To learn more about Kontera, Kontera’s Related Information and Content solutions, Semantic Advertising or Contextual Advertising visit: www.kontera.com.