Inuvo : Advertising Now Has AI that Functions Like the Human Brain

What is a Concept? It's one of the top questions new customers and partners ask us, and rightly so. Originating from the Latin word conceptum, concepts are tied to thought, frame of mind, and imagination. As it relates to ad targeting, we define a Concept (yes, capital 'C') as the cognitive associations between words and ideas that form naturally in your mind. Concepts derive meaning only as they relate to other entities.

In many ways, Concepts function like a round of word association. Quick: what's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear or see the word 'green'? It might be an ecological lifestyle. A color. Money. A political party. A particular area on a golf course. There's no right or wrong association. All of these different associations are simply Concepts in our book.

It's a matter of perception. The classic Rubin's vase image can be perceived equally as a vase, or two facial profiles. The Rorschach inkblot is unlimited in what it holds, depending on the mindset of the viewer. Perceptions are different, and that's an area where ad targeting gets tricky. Our collective perceptions, behaviors and experiences all factor in to be the great ball of human intent.

The potential universe of 'greenness'

We're all familiar with common targeting approaches, such as keyword, semantic, contextual, and behavioral. Keywords effectively function as a literal, one-to-one match of input and output. Using our same example above, the word 'green' must be present in the text of a webpage to be considered a match - albeit one rife with potential for linguistic ambiguity.

By contrast, semantic targeting is the domain of natural language processing and linguistic taxonomies. Categorizing 'green' in the metaphorical hierarchy of kingdom and phylum might be clear, but things get murky down at the genus and species level. And yet accuracy makes the difference between capturing intent - or not. Trying to classify every linguistic use case of 'green' is nearly impossible and faces scalability issues. In many ways a semantic approach to advertising mirrors a site-and-section media buying approach more so than granular, page-level impression buying.

With Concepts, all the various ideas associated with 'green' form naturally into discrete clusters. This enables the mere notion of green - expressed through surrounding ideas on a page - to come through loud and clear, without requiring the literal inclusion of the word itself. Looked at another way, you might associate 'Las Vegas' with glitz or kitsch. A sunny desert holiday may come to mind, or an annual tech conference pilgrimage. The ability to accurately parse these clues and ferret out intent makes a material difference for advertisers and publishers.

While some of these ideas may seem commonsense, that's because you're human and it's the way the mind works. But the idea of an ad-targeting algorithm understanding these same associations is pretty heady stuff. Inuvo's IntentKeyTM is a patented, contextually based, machine-learning technology created to mirror the manner in which the human brain can instantly associate ideas, emotions, places, people, and objects. The IntentKeyTM was trained by 4 billion pages of content where it learned through a trillion examples the relative importance of how 25 million Concepts relate to each other. The IntentKeyTM understands the difference between a golf green, being environmentally conscious, a political party, and money. This allows our clients to have their ads served in a relevant and brand safe context, driving performance.

We have trained a machine to think like the human brain. And the advertising power from this AI can't be overstated.