Contextual targeting – one of the oldest tricks in the advertising playbook – has been enjoying a comeback in recent years as an alternative to third-party-cookie-based audiences.
Dotdash Meredith (DDM) reembraced contextual when it launched an in-house contextual targeting solution, D/Cipher, back in 2022. The solution combines content-based signals with first-party data insights into how the publisher’s audiences cross over into its different content verticals.
The launch was timed to coincide with Google’s now-revised plans to turn off third-party cookies for all Chrome users in 2024. But DDM is using the cookie’s extended lifeline to prove that D/Cipher campaigns outperform cookie-based campaigns, which is winning it more repeat business and bigger budgets, says DDM’s Lindsay Van Kirk on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. She joined the publisher holding company as SVP and GM of D/Cipher in January.
And rather than contextual being the old-school approach in need of refreshing, “cookies are the oldest-school, broken mechanism we have for trying to find consumers,” Van Kirk says.
It’s a notable reversal coming from Van Kirk, who spent the early part of her career overseeing the development of DSP tech at AppNexus/Xandr – or, in her own words, building the cookie-based buying tools that “broke the way the supply chain is supposed to work for buyers and sellers.”
She sees the opportunity to helm D/Cipher as a chance to correct some of the mistakes of the cookie-based status quo – and the negative effects that status quo has had for publishers and advertisers.
Van Kirk spoke to AdExchanger about the current state of D/Cipher and how she wants the product to evolve under her leadership.
Also in this episode: Van Kirk draws on her past ad tech product management experience to explain why D/Cipher seems to be succeeding while other publisher in-house ad tech products have struggled. And she teases some possible new features for D/Cipher, including self-serve targeting for buyers.
