SIIA’s Content Division recently held a half day event at McGraw Hill in New York entitled “Driving Revenues with Semantics: How Semantic Technologies Boost ROI for Digital Media Companies”. The program was designed to cover semantic opportunities for both ad and subscription supported businesses. Here are some highlights from the sold-out event:
Evan Sandhaus, Lead Architect, Semantic Platforms at The New York Times Company served as the opening keynote. In rapid fire style he brought the audience up to speed on the technologies used and projects built around semantic technology. One of the more humorous anecdotes shared by Evan was the existence of “Standing Tall”, a tool built in their lab that lets you sort stories by the height of the people mentioned in the article. Alas it is not open to the public.
Evan also shared that their Linked Open Data project will enable developers with free access to mapped NY Times data but not to articles. Tools that company has used to align its content includes DBPedia, Freebase, and Geonames.
This session was followed up by a panel on How Semantic Advertising Can Bring Major Brand Dollars Online. Rob Beeler, VP of Content and Community at Admonsters deftly led the group through some interesting discussions that he summed up well in his post session tweet: “cookies and keywords took a hit and semantics and brands won.” Andy Ellenthal, CEO of Peer39 shared some great and humorous insights as well by reminding the delegates to beware of creepy ad targeting because when you get creepy, you get very narrow! He also pointed out something that is true for all businesses that “When you forget about the consumer, you get in trouble pretty quickly”.
Barry Graubart, VP of Customer Development at CrowdFusion and Vice Chair of the Content Division led the final panel of the day: Semantically-Enriched Content: More Usage, Better Products. He assembled panelists from across the publishing landscape to talk about their experiences using this technology as a source of strategic advantage in new product development. Hitesh Chitalia of McGraw Hill pointed out that their adoption of semantic technology starts with having issues driven by the business and then having the development team finding the semantic technology to solve it.
The day was rounded out by two company presentations from Alanna Clark at Admeld and Daniel Mayer at TEMIS. Both gave examples of how their customers use their products for results in the ad and product worlds respectively. This reinforces a key focus of SIIA events where we strive to highlight important products and companies that our membership should be aware of.
As Barry Graubart pointed out “It is the rare event where there are only 5 unclaimed badges at the registration table!” Since this event was a sellout, we encourage you to keep an eye out for our next session at McGraw Hill in September 2011 entitled “Building bridges from SEO/SEM to Enterprise Search.”