contextual advertising

Buyers already have access to the same information from the same trusted third-parties that publishers use to define Contextual Categories. So why bother?

Contextual advertising isn’t the privacy-safe panacea everyone thinks it is. As user-level IDs diminish on the web and in apps, publishers and ad tech companies are fighting over what “contextual advertising” even means and who has the right to serve contextual placements.

Contextual targeting laid the foundations of TV advertising – particularly by ensuring that ads were stitched into content marketers considered “brand safe.” With the advent of CTV, buyers put context on the back-burner in favor of more granular, first-party audience targeting. Now, the pendulum is swinging back again. Why? Two words: signal loss.

The overturn of Roe v. Wade, the ongoing war in Ukraine, a stock market collapse – it’s all the news that’s fit to print, but how are publishers going to monetize it if brands are skittish about serious topics? Plus: The dangers of data collection in a post-Roe world.

Keyword blocklists are blunt instruments, and yet they persist in programmatic media buying. It’s time to kick blocklists to the curb and start curating keywords by campaign, says contextual pioneer John Snyder, who sold his company, Grapeshot, to Oracle in 2018.

Google’s decision to delay third-party cookie deprecation until 2023 came the day before Salon CRO Justin Wohl’s wedding. Salon had converted its ad business to an open-web programmatic model a few years earlier, so the brief reprieve from signal loss came as a huge relief and another reason to pop some champagne. Since then, Wohl has been laying the groundwork for effective post-cookie monetization on the open web.

Integral Ad Science is chasing two shiny trends – contextual targeting and connected TV – as the company charts a course in digital measurement and ad verification. The growth plan has generated, well, growth. IAS earned $323.5 million last year, up by more than a third from 2020, the company reported in its quarterly earnings report on Thursday. Though Integral’s net loss grew year-over-year as well, from $32 million to $52 million.

With cookies (finally) cooling off, contextual targeting tech is starting to heat up. On Tuesday, ShowHeroes Group, a video and contextual targeting tech provider based in Europe, announced its acquisition of cross-screen ad platform smartclip LATAM (as in Latin America). The rationale behind the deal is to help ShowHeroes Group bring its solution to the […]

With the looming threat of privacy crackdowns across the globe – and big platform changes coming – contextual advertising is starting to look pretty good again. And not just on the open web – on TV, too. On Wednesday, Precise TV, a kid-safe contextual advertising platform for YouTube, announced a partnership with video data platform […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Neeva Have I Eeva Paid To Search  The search engine startup Neeva launched its $5 per-month tier on Wednesday, Fast Company reports.  It’s small news – Neeva has some hundreds of thousands of users – but it’s an important marker because at least someone’s […]