Taykey, a startup that uses real-time topic analysis to help companies target their ads, has expanded its lineup with what the company calls its Topical Advertising Platform. Co-founder and CEO Amit Avner says the launch should help Taykey reach a new customer base of performance advertisers.
Avner says there are two big pieces to the launch. First, there’s the service that was Taykey was providing already — helping brands understand the trends and topics that are important to their audiences at the moment. For example, if news breaks about a famous musician, and a brand wants to reach young music fans, then Taykey will start bidding on ads next to content related to that musician. (The company currently runs advertising YouTube, Facebook, and Google search and display.)
The idea, Avner says, is to help advertisers optimize their campaigns in real-time, “improving reach and putting your brands where the attention is.”
Second, Taykey now offers to help advertisers target “hidden consumers” (the ones who don’t identify themselves as part of your target audience) with performance-based ads. Avner says the way you reach those consumers is to figure out the kinds of content they’re going to be interested in, and advertise on that content. In other words, it’s the same basic idea as Taykey’s existing service, but instead of helping brands respond to the news, it’s helping advertisers go “prospecting” for new customers.
“Right now everyone uses Facebook [and] Google to retarget existing consumers they know of,” Avner says. “But not everyone who loves music identify themselves as such, so we look at what’s topical for known consumers to find more people like that.”
To do this kind of targeting, Taykey says it monitors more than 50,000 online sources and conducts both topic and sentiment analysis. It’s now working with brands like GE, Coca-Cola, and Sprint.