Philo believes it's time to expand beyond cannabis.
According to Tuesday's announcement, Fyllo will shift its focus from targeted advertising compliance in a highly regulated industry, namely the legalized cannabis space, to more general contextual targeting.
The company also plans to rebrand to Fyllo|Semasio to highlight the contextual targeting technology it acquired from Semasio in 2022.
President Jeff Ragovin, who previously founded Buddy Media and joined Fyllo in 2020, will become CEO.
From cannabis to context
Ragovin told AdExchanger that his appointment as Fyllo's president last July was an adjusted break-in period, and that his term as CEO is expected to begin in 2024.
Since joining the company, he has pivoted the business towards context to take advantage of the Semasio acquisition and the potential resurgence of contextual advertising, a type of targeting that does not use third-party cookies.
Ragovin said cannabis is becoming more mainstream, but it's still too niche as a single-industry business and is subject to federal regulation, which limits the company's growth potential. . “It’s not sustainable to put everything in the basket.”
But given the industry-wide push for privacy-based alternatives to third-party cookies, Semasio's contextual targeting business has more room to grow, he said.
As a result, the future of addressability is on every ad buyer's mind, Ragovin said. He also said that Fyllo|Semasio hopes to offer a hybrid platform that allows advertisers to avoid “cookie cracking” by enriching context-based audiences and first-party data.
within the platform
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The Fyllo|Semasio algorithm combines to create targeted audiences based on past user browsing behavior, cross-site cookie tracking, and contextual signals from past ad transactions.
By analyzing this bidstream data, the platform creates new lookalike audiences and media placements for your brand.
The model is trained on historical (cookie-based) data, so it will no longer rely on cookie matching, Ragovin said.
Like other context solutions, the Fyllo|Semasio model relies on a web crawler that parses context signals from text on publisher pages.
To build custom contextual segments, advertisers enter targeting keywords into the Semasio platform, which spits out a word cloud of relevant contextual matches. For example, a fitness equipment manufacturer might use the keyword “treadmill,” which incorporates keywords like “elliptical” and “running.”
The platform bases these contextual matches on standard content taxonomies, such as those provided by the IAB, as well as Semasio's proprietary content taxonomies. In total, the platform currently has about 500 always-on contextual audience segments, and advertisers have built more than 100,000 custom segments, Ragovin said.
The platform then provides a list of publishers whose content matches the keywords selected by the advertiser and provides a rough estimate of the impression size of those sites. These context segments can be deployed to any DSP or SSP.
Advertisers can also use first-party data to further enrich their contextual segments. By doing so, you can also apply alternative ID sets to find matches based on deterministic signals such as email login or household.
Infillion, which has been working with Semasio for the past five years, has integrated the platform's contextual capabilities into MediaMath's DSP, which it acquired in August's bankruptcy auction.
According to Ben Smith, vice president of data products at Infillion, customers bring a list of keywords to Infillion, which uses the Fyllo|Semasio platform to create custom context segments and sends them to the MediaMath DSP for activation. It is said that there will be a tivation.
The process takes 24 hours, which is faster than most other situational solutions thanks to the companies' years of integration, he added.
Future plans
Ragovin said Fyllo|Semasio plans to enhance its contextual video and CTV capabilities in the future.
The platform currently supports audience-based targeting on CTV. However, the company is working to add content-based, contextual targeting to video and CTV by pursuing integration with video platforms, linear TV providers, and mobile apps.
However, we are still in the early stages in the video space and there is no timeline for these additional integrations.
The roadmap also includes allowing customers to target content that expresses specific sentiments about specific topics. For example, differentiate between content for people who love fitness and content for people who know they need to exercise more but don't like to exercise. .
The company also wants to increase its direct outreach to agencies, Ragovin said, and wants to eliminate the perception that Fyllo is competing with agencies by approaching brands directly. As a niche cannabis advertising services vendor, that perception held true. But now, he said, the technology serves as a middle layer that agencies use to work with brands.
But the company's top priority is not advertising compliance, but ensuring the industry knows that Fyllo|Semasio is part of the ad tech world.
“Semácio is our food and this is our future,” Ragovin said. “The cannabis thing was cool, but now it's just another field.”
