But there’s another issue, which is might actually be more important — most of the time retargeted ads have little to do with the content surrounding them. This makes them more susceptible to banner blindness or, far worse, makes consumers feel like they’re being stalked. Can you say negative brand connotation?

As WebMD CEO Wayne Gattinella commented at PubMatic’s Ad Revenue 4 event last week, “Targeting out of context is like telemarketing. I’m in the middle of something else right now.”

So enter NetSeer, imbuing some of its concept-based contextual targeting into its new brand-safe retargeting service. In effect, the company has built a gateway to balancing out cookie- or audience targeting with contextual targeting.

The company analyzes 1.5 billion impressions daily through its Content Mapper technology, which sketches relationships between various concepts (not keywords). Sites with pornography and other adult content as well as drugs, hate speech and other nasty stuff are automatically blacklisted for retargeting efforts.

NetSeer’s burgeoning display business is built on contextual targeting on the exchanges, scanning for content that matches an advertiser’s concept list. When a prospective impression pops up, it is run through ContentMapper to determine appropriateness and general concepts; if it passes, the URL is cached and will have a thumbs up for placement next time it appears.

So for retargeting campaigns, advertisers need to simply submit exclusion lists to NetSeer full of concepts they don’t want to be associated with. NetSeer serves the ad when the targeted consumer appears on an approved site with content with conceptually relevant material related to the advertiser’s offering.

“With its ability to find contextually relevant inventory beyond the usual premium sites without compromising brand integrity, NetSeer allows me to assure my clients that they will receive near-perfect brand safety at scale and reach a relevant audience — all at exchange-level pricing,” explained Ralph Thomson, president of digital marketing firm eBrains. “We work with major destination brands in the travel and tourism industry and the majority of them now have NetSeer as a smart strategic part of their digital solution. In fact, the reach, relevancy and brand safety provided by NetSeer eliminates the need to consider other display resources and saves our clients time and money.”

Sponsored by 24/7 Real Media, TRAFFIQ, Adometry and Big Fuel — and put together with a great assistance from Max Ramirez of Digital Media Events — Adotas Off-Duty packed the bar at Cipriani Club 55 with representatives from just about every nook and cranny of the digital advertising space.

Before the mass consumption of alcohol and foodstuffs, Adotas hosted an event with some top-notch speakers. First Big Fuel CEO Jon Bond, cofounder of Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, expounded about trends and opportunities agencies are missing in the social media arena. Then Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry, gave a brief talk about attribution models before 24/7 Real Media SVP of Business Development Larry Allen discussed why finding a digital advertising partner was so imperative in the ultra-cluttered space.

But enough work! It was time for drinks and food. I sipped white wine and listened in disbelief as Bradley Lewis, CEO and founder of QR Media Group, explained the impetus for his QR code social network Skanz came from reading an article… on Adotas. Wow, we’re actually inspirational. Indeed, Lewis has really taken the idea of QR codes and run with it, as Skanz’ customizable codes can be used to do anything from managing contacts (and all their social links) to aiding brands in instantly engaging consumers.

We promised to talk more later, as I was distracted by how incredible my proscuitto and mozzarella appetizer was — seriously, I hadn’t eaten so good since I was last in Italy. More wine flowed, and I found myself telling TRAFFIQ CEO Nick Pahade about my time at TheStreet.com, which included the dark period after Chairman Jim Cramer was dissected by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” My main course, grilled sea bass, was absolutely luscious, but I couldn’t stick around for desert because the party had started.

Immediately I ran into folks from e-Miles, a company I wrote about a few weeks ago, who discussed future plans for its value exchange service. I also ran into Londa Lavender, the senior director of business development for Datonics, and caught up on what’s going on at the third-party data provider, which was recently spun off from AlmondNet.

I also chatted up a few guys from Evidon, who really needed their drinks considering the complications inherent in getting the behavioral opt-out system perfect. John Mracek, CEO of Netseer, also said hi, and commented on some partnerships the concept-based conceptual targeter is working out.

And right at the end of the evening, I was introduced to a slew of Finnish mobile companies that were in town to promote their wares. Ismo Rantala, CEO of the Finnish Mobile Association, intrigued me with details of an incubator specifically for mobile companies hailing from Finland that his association was currently trying to build in NYC.

All in all, I had a great time, and was thoroughly exhausted from meeting exciting new faces in the industry as well as catching up with old pros. But don’t just take my word for it — we have photographic proof.

But beyond that, it seems inevitable that hybrid systems of contextual and audience targeting will eventually rule the display market. Interestingly, ad pepper media has delivered one through its new adXplus real-time bidding platform.

In addition to delivering advertisers the audiences they crave in real-time across multiple networks and exchanges, adXplus also employs ad pepper’s iSense semantic targeting to find suitable context as well.

“adXplus was designed to constantly adjust bid values for every impression based on a multitude of data criteria including user, context and performance enabling us to deliver the right ad to the right user in context yielding the best possible campaign performance,” explained Sacha Carton, director of Product & Technology Development and director of the board.

adXplus also offers retargeting abilities, automated optimization technology and comprehensive reporting. Finally, the platform includes SiteScreen semantic brand protection technology, which Adotas covered in great detail on its launch.

The new RTB platform is one of several marketing solutions ad pepper operates across online channels. There’s also lead generation through iLead, email marketing with mailpepper, affiliate marketing via Webgains, as well as contextually targeted display advertising on publishers who are part of the iSense ad network.

Considering its Herculean task, it doesn’t seem surprising that Content Mapper, the technology base of NetSeer’s concept-based contextual advertising, grew out of technology developed by UCLA scientists for studying the complexity of the human genome. And it was this technology that drew online marketing veteran John Mracek to the firm.

“Content Mapper is complicated but intuitive,” says the NetSeer CEO. “I thought, there’s real technology here.”

A computer science major from MIT, Mracek been around just about every tech block, including a stint with Apple during the tumultuous 90s (i.e., before the return of Steve Jobs). Even in the online marketing world, his positions have run the gamut — working on early buy-side media management tool Focal Point; vice president of advertising products at Yahoo!, where he oversaw the development and introduction of SmartAds; and prior to NetSeer, vice president and general manager of distributed commerce at PPC network Shopping.com,

He thinks about Content Mapper this way: When a person views a web page, the brain uses all his/her collected knowledge and experience to analyze what’s on that page. The ultimate goal of NetSeer’s contextual system is to replicate that process and use it serve the most contextually relevant ads or links, depending on the product and customer.

NetSeer’s purely machine-based system with a rudimentary language processor is more scalable and accurate than its competitors’ keyword-based semantic analysis, Mracek says. The mapper, which has more than 70 million concepts and 2 billion relationships under its belt, scours a page for concepts, weighing how they relate to each other, before locating them on the map.

The system recognize “off-page” concepts and weighs the value of conceptual connections — direct, indirect, etc. As a result, ContentMapper builds giant clusters of concepts like the image on top.

Indices of Concepts

Then there’s the business side — first up is ConceptLinks, a tool for publishers that turns display units into lists of sponsored search link depots. Based on the page content, ConceptLinks serves an index of related concepts, Users click through to a search results page (powered by a search engine) that can feature internal links, external links and paid search ads.

The 200 publishers currently using the product have watched search page clicks multiply rapidly. NetSeer comments that the average client page eCPM without ConceptLinks is $3.53; with ConceptLinks that figure goes up to $5.86.

And now it’s going mobile, thanks to a partnership with mobile ad network Mobile Theory. Promising to be a “mobile alternative to Google AdSense,” constantly refreshed indices of concepts will be served to both mobile web-enabled and non-mobile-web enabled sites through Mobile Theory. Business Insider, MinyanVille and Wikia are some of the mobile publishers that will feature ConceptLinks.

The Display Angle

While that’s pretty cool, it’s the Media, or display, product that’s turning heads. After testing in beta last year, NetSeer soft-launched its Media Product at the beginning of the year and focused on garnering business from agencies working with health, travel and CPG clients — Mracek is quick to note that the technology works for all verticals.

Basically, NetSeer scans the various exchanges for content that matches advertiser’s concept list. When a prospective page pops up, it runs through ContentMapper to determine appropriateness; the URL is cached and will have a thumbs up for placement next time it appears.

But what about conflicts, like discount flight ads running next to news stories about plane crashes? NetSeer clients build exclusion lists — Mracek suggests that a dog food company might want to exclude the concept of “Michael Vick” — that fill the need for ad-blocking components.

This keyword-free approach to contextual display targeting already has many success stories, which are likely to grow as more inventory migrates to the exchanges.

While Mracek calls himself a “big believer” in audience buying and targeting, he feels the shortcomings of the sector are coming to light.

“A lot of audience buying is just retargeting, which is probably the most effective method,” he comments. “You may have a great cookie list, but you have to face a lack of inventory. It’s tough to scale.”

But also, without any sense of context, Mracek wonders how much audience buying is leading to wasted impressions. It’s a good question.

At Yahoo, Coleman, 53, served as executive vice president of global sales; he managed global ad revenues, and under his watch they grew them tenfold from $600 million to roughly $6 billion. He is also credited with integrating the company’s sales channels for search and display, was pivotal in driving improvements for advertisers by focusing on behavioral targeting and new technologies, including Right Media.

Coleman left Yahoo in February after announcing his departure last summer. He’d been with the Internet company for seven years. Hilary Schneider, executive vice president for global partner solutions has taken on Coleman’s duties.

“Over the past decade, the face of media and advertising has been transformed because of the vast reach and measurability of the Internet,” said Coleman. “But intention-based ad targeting in new media is in its infancy. We are setting out to significantly change the game.”

NetSeer was founded in 2006 and has roughly 30 employees. The startup is focused on using mathematics and algorithms to identify ideas and relationships in search terms.

“Since our founding, we have been working to develop a substantial and unique technology base,” said Vwani Roychowdhury, cofounder of NetSeer. “Greg brings unparalleled experience and a unique perspective to build an organization that can introduce and evangelize our technology to online advertisers and publishers.”