Seedtag Is Ready for Contextual Advertising’s Renaissance

Brian Danzis is a busy bee. In addition to running Seedtag as President, North America, he’s been on the speaking circuit. Most recently he was at Advertising Week in New York in October, speaking on a panel about CTV and retail media. In September, Danzis appeared at the Cynopsis Big TV Summit on a panel called, “The Promise of Contextual TV.”

Seedtag, a contextual advertising company, recently announced a milestone achievement: It reached 164% Increase in advertising performance using its proprietary DPO (dynamic placement optimization) technology.

“Advertising week was incredible, as always,” Danzis said of the period October 7-10.  “It was a good opportunity to spend time with publishing partners and account leaders that we flew in from all around the country. We had some wonderful panels a really great dinner, so a lot of fun.”

Danzis sat down with StreetFight to explain its success with DPO in more detail.

Can you explain how the company’s dynamic placement optimization technology works?

We call our proprietary artificial intelligence “Liz,” and she understands the open web, contextualizing both the written word and images. We can create custom, cookie-less audiences based on that understanding of context. What Liz has also been able to do is, based on other signals we get in real time from the user’s consumption of media, is place different types of behaviors into what we call the watcher, the reader, or the scroller based, upon what they’re doing with a web page.

If they are scrolling quickly or are watching something, Liz is able to dynamically place the right type of format based on that experience. Liz is not only contextualizing the actual content that someone may be consuming but she’s contextualizing the environment and the behavior of that person in that moment. That allows us to determine what the best, most optimal media is to drive results.

Can Liz determine what physical location the person is in?

We do get signals based upon geography, but that’s very standard, not using any privacy compliance. I don’t know if someone’s at a store or something like that. We use DPO as part of our media execution strategy. Someone could ask us to build a custom cookie-less, privacy-compliant audience, and then we deploy that audience against media. We use DPO and also DCO (dynamic creative optimization), the creative and the placement, to drive the best experience for the user resulting in outcomes.

Which brands are using this technology?

We’re not disclosing specific brands, but we are working with every vertical across 17 different markets right now. So, it is a fairly applicable technology and capability for every major brand. The DPO is less about someone in a physical environment and more about the contextual environment of the content. When we designate someone as a “watcher” we understand that people are watching visual content, so we’ll deliver in-image ads or in-video content.

What else does Liz look for?

If they’re scrolling quickly through content the scroll speed is detected. While reading high-interest type articles where attention is on, the text will deploy a different type of placement. If someone is scrolling even more quickly, that will deliver a different type of article. So, we have different metrics that our partner, Lumen, worked with us to evaluate. We want to tailor page experiences, deliver higher attention to these audiences, and deliver better publisher modernization for our publishing partners.

Let’s talk more about the164% increase in advertising performance. Did Seedtag have any partner companies assist with this achievement?

Lumen did this measurement across 12,000 different domains and analyzed 3 billion impressions globally. They compared our dynamic placement optimization formats versus standard IAB formats. Again, identifying those readers, scrollers, and watchers. The 164% increase is a combination of the increase from all of those different placements.

At the Cynopsis Big TV summit you mentioned that Seedtag works with Realeyes.

Realeyes is very similar. They use eye-tracking technology to measure attention but they also can measure human emotional response based on different facial expressions people make that they capture via web cameras. Realeyes measured not only DPO but our use of generative AI creative capabilities.

You also mentioned that AI is a unique differentiator for Seedtag. How do you deploy AI in a way that’s different from other companies?

Our AI is proprietary and been “alive” almost as long as the entire company. AI essentially allows us to understand globally what trends are happening on the open web and then make those connections between key topics and understand what culture is interested in that moment. That allows us to provide strategic advice to agencies on how they should think about their audiences, their competitors, and what type of verticals are of interest. Our AI essentially builds these custom contextual audiences right there and then.

It’s really a full-funnel solution. The AI is powering everything that we do, and it’s all built in-house. We’re not white labeling anything. It’s all ours. It’s also natively trained over a dozen languages, which is a key differentiator. We’re global. We need to have it recognize different dialects. A lot of companies will translate a language to English and then analyze it. Our AI is recognized as the native language. Even Arabic, which is very difficult to do.