Contextual Advertising Could See Significant Growth in Downturn

Offline advertising may be hurting, but at the AlwaysOn conference last week, online advertisers--especially those with performance-based models--were still reporting positive growth, including semantic advertising company Peer39, one of the OnMedia 100. 

Peer39's technology reads the context of an entire page rather than individual words to deliver accurately targeted advertising. The company acquired the inventors of Google AdSense and talent from Tacoda for their team, and as a result has "a good understanding of both the contextual systems and the behavioral systems," CEO Amiad Solomon told me. "[W]e believe semantic is sort of the holy grail of everything." 

Many performance-based advertisers will do better not in spite of the recession, but because of it. "Actually our revenue in Q1 will be much bigger than in Q4, and I forecast that in this year we will see this trend continuing quarter after quarter, especially now..." Amiad says. "Even the brand dollars will be shifting into better results and better targeting."

Frank Addante discussed advertising trends during the recession as well; you can watch that interview here. We have more interviews on performance-based advertising coming up.

Andy previously interviewed Amiad at Stanford this summer. 

--Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer