Start-Up Watch COD: Proximic improves results through the power of granular contextual and audience data

If site and audience data are key tools in the effort to get better results from online ads, it stands to reason that more precise data may make a real difference in results.

That’s what Proximic describes as its value proposition. Proximic provides more granular contextual and audience data to DSPs, networks, pubs and SSPs. The offering is based on real time analysis of the content of a page and the precise interests of your target audience. Think about their data in the context of three layers.

•More specific contextual data: Proximal offers more contextual buckets than most data vendors. So, for example, not just sports by extreme sports or snow sports. While this might have only minimal value for a brand aimed at M LDA-34, it could have profound value for products aimed at more specific sports audiences. You don’t want to try and sell skis to pro soccer fans. Or at least you might not want to. In toto, the company says that it matches content across “hundreds of thousands” of categories and reverse engineers that match to the keywords and concepts you care about.

•Highly specific brand safety data. Not just porn/no porn. There is a rating system for content maturity, violence, negativity, language, alcohol consumption, and the like. Perhaps for you G rated is essential. For another brand, the idea might be PG 13 or even R, but no X. That kind of granularity might prove very valuable if you’re selling Maxim versus Boys Life subs.

•Rich audience interest data. By collecting information about what prospects are examining, the platform can help refine contextual parameters AND expand the range of sites in your buy. This, it promises, can grow focus AND scale.

Given the correlation between user engagement and content, ad performance climbs when the user sees ads on content that is more likely to strongly reflect their interests. According to Proximic, that granularity opens up a lot more mid and long tail sites to brand advertising, which grows reach and drives down CPMs.

Here’s their elevator video:



One of the interesting twists about this data solution play is that its contextual analysis is not based upon linguistic algorithms. This means that its power is not limited to English language pages. Instead, a global brand can reach its audience across nations, languages, and cultures, focusing instead on the contextual interests that are most closely associated with brand response.

Available through the DSPs as well as to networks, pubs, and SSPs, Proximic would appear to offer benefits to the sell side in that it enables greater real time understanding of what is on all pages, so that their true value can be monetized.

One thing that I think is clear is that more brands will be widening their site selection parameters. Because audiences don’t cluster in such large numbers on the top sites anymore. Clearly Proximic exists to help brands go broad AND deep.

Thanks to ad:tech for publishing this first.