LucidMedia Layers on Contextual Relevance for Exchanges

Digital advertising platform LucidMedia has partnered with Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange to launch a new range of contextual advertising capabilities for Lucid’s ClickSense service.

ClickSense, first launched in 2004, will now allow advertisers to group content based on 60 vertically focused categories with a variety of blocking and corrective measures to prevent ads from showing up in inappropriate places. The channels include automotive, careers, apparel, finance, sports and recreation, and others.

The system, which has been in development for 10 years, is not exclusive to Right Media Exchange, according to LucidMedia CEO Ajay Sravanapudi. It will be made available to other ad networks immediately, he said, noting other unnamed networks are signed on.

“Contextually targeted ads can be significantly more relevant to users and thus more valuable to publishers, which we believe will ultimately allow advertisers to target their campaigns more effectively and drive improved conversions and return-on-spend,” he said.

He added the ClickSense system has a unique method of reading Web copy to more accurately determine whether it belonged in a given category.

“On any of the other exchanges, publishers can tell you, ‘This is a travel or sports or healthcare page.’ But with ClickSense, we can tell you if they’re telling the truth,” he said. “If we say a page is about healthcare or breast cancer treatment, we can back it up with data.”

The new ClickWise capabilities “will significantly help increase the prospective yield of a publisher’s available inventory and improve an advertiser’s ability to contextually target ads to relevant content and categories,” Right Media GM Bill Wise told ClickZ News.