Why target ads based on incomplete or unreliable user data when you could instead target based on the content those ads are running against?
Samba TV must have found this pitch pretty convincing, because on Thursday the TV measurement company announced its acquisition of audience data and contextual targeting solution Semasio.
Official terms have not been disclosed, but Semasio had previously raised $80 million worth of investment funds and made over $20 million in revenue annually, according to Samba TV CEO Ashwin Navin.
This acquisition isn’t the first time Semasio’s changed owners, in a strictly technical sense. In 2022 the company was purchased by Fyllo, a cannabis-specific ad compliance platform, which rebranded to Fyllo|Semasio earlier this year, then dropped the Fyllo branding a few months later.
Navin told AdExchanger that the company won out against several other competing bids when Semasio first went up for sale several months ago.
Current Semasio CEO Jeff Ragovin will be handing off leadership of this combined iteration of Semasio, which includes Fyllo’s technology, to the contextual company’s General Manager Zac Pinkham during the transition.
From there, Samba TV plans to integrate its video data fully into Semasio’s platform, allowing clients like Acxiom and National Media to access better contextual relevance across digital, mobile and CTV.
Content is King
Navin said Samba TV was particularly interested in Semasio’s capacity for semantic analysis. The company indexes and analyzes 2.5 billion web pages a month to perform this function, which allows for better targeting based on a site’s content rather than the viewer.
Under a typical audience targeting model, a user might go to an online tech publication and see an ad for a travel company that could feel out of place based on the site’s content, even if the user themselves is personally interested in travel.
Contextual targeting that’s based on content, in contrast, would instead serve up ads more relevant to the tech publication’s purview.
Notably, advertising based on content doesn’t require user data to work, making it more privacy compliant than previous models – and more actionable for the CTV landscape, where identity resolution was less robust even before the rise of signal loss.
But video content is much more complex for AI models to analyze than text is, with more contextual factors at play. A travel ad makes a lot more sense juxtaposed against a culture-specific cooking show, for example, so only showing food-related ads on food-related channels would miss out on that possible connection point.
Samba is already developing its own AI tools to better analyze video content, as Navin demonstrated during the IAB NewFronts in May. But joining forces with Semasio could help to push that technology further and faster.
An AI vision for the future
Semasio happens to be the second AI-related company acquired by Samba TV in two years, the first being TV voice activation startup Disruptel in 2022.
“We’ve been pretty optimistic about what the future of AI means for our industry. Our vision is that AI-generated data and insights will yield better-performing and better-quality ads,” Navin said of the trend.
The term “AI-generated data,” by the way, doesn’t mean the data is being invented whole cloth via a singular generative AI technology. Rather, it’s sourced through a variety of machine learning methods, including natural language processing for text, computer vision for visual data and dozens of other AI models to provide analysis that aids in contextual targeting.
“There’s no way a human can watch all these videos,” explained Navin. “So you need an AI vision for how you do this, 24/7, at massive scale, and then make all that [contextual] data available for real-time bidding and programmatic advertising.”
During the next six to twelve months, Samba plans to expand the reach of its own data across Semasio’s platform, such that it becomes the company’s primary path for delivering data to major ad tech platforms on a global scale. (Semasio currently reaches over 50 countries, and Samba only nine.)
Beyond that, Navin has his sights set on using its tech as a foundation for further innovation in the AI space and “trying to bridge Semasio’s web product to video and CTV.”
“We’ve basically never built our business on trying to do old stuff. We’re trying to build new stuff,” he said. “Right now, there’s a massive opportunity to use AI to enhance productivity and accelerate our road maps.”
