Semantic Advertising

This paper introduces the concept of online "Semantic Advertising", which we see as the technology that will help realize the full potential of Internet advertising. Internet advertising is a rapidly growing and arguably a dominant form of advertising. A recent IDC report (Weide, 2013) estimates that the total Internet advertising spend in 2011 was 87.4 billion dollars ($35B for the U.S. only), and predicts an annual growth rate of 16% over the next 5 years. We argue that Semantic Advertising, (SA), enables us to address the challenge of delivering relevance at scale in Internet Advertising. Our argument is based on our work as a company developing semantic technology for better online advertising. Semantic technology (Hitzler, Krotzsch and Rudolph, 2009) can be described as algorithms and software that enable representation and reasoning based on meaning. Several companies such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and smaller startup companies have developed semantic technologies for advertising.