contextual targeting

Axel Springer announced a multiyear partnership with video monetization platform Connatix to create new contextual video ad inventory on certain sites.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

After years of courting lower-funnel performance budgets – and charging on a cost-per-click basis – Outbrain foresees further growth in attracting upper-funnel spend. It’s doing so by giving brands a way to measure their return on investment in awareness campaigns by tracking whether people are actually paying attention to their ads.

Dotdash Meredith bet on contextual with its launch of D/Cipher, but it remains to be seen whether it can turn its revenue numbers around.

2022 was a record-breaking year for US digital advertising revenues, which cracked the $200 billion mark for the first time, according to the IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report released Wednesday.

UK-based publisher LADbible Group is testing post-cookie alternatives and building its contextual targeting capabilities. But the social-first publisher has yet to be convinced that any of these alternatives will be a truly viable replacement for the much-maligned – and yet still widely used – third-party cookie.

Ad tech must quit its addiction to user IDs and instead start focusing on how we can innovate in other areas: audience targeting, managing frequency and improving measurement (especially conversion attribution). Meanwhile, contextual and geo-based targeting are a great way to reach an audience and get better than expected ROI on campaigns, writes Ian Trider, VP of RTB platform operations at Basis Technologies.

What does a bloody third-person shooter game about robbing banks at gunpoint have in common with a hyper-casual game that involves flipping a strip of cartoon bacon from a skillet to try and make it land on random objects? The answer: Not much, but both are classified as “action” games, according to Apple and Google in their respective app stores.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is the most mature and comprehensive health data protection law in the US. (It passed in 1996.) But does this patient data protection law apply to data-driven advertising and online data collection? The answer is yes and no.

Ad agencies are understaffed and their clients – small businesses in particular – often don’t have the time or the technical background to sift through reams of campaign data. And so, increasingly, they’re turning to automation to cut down on the more tedious and time-consuming aspects of account management. Tag, an independent agency based in Iowa, uses a suite of automated reporting tools, including from Basis Technologies, to communicate cross-platform campaign metrics to its clients.

As clients look for alternatives to third-party cookies, ad agency Dentsu can steer them to its in-house Contextual Intelligence tool, which launched today. Although contextual targeting is often considered inferior to demographic or behavioral targeting, it can drive performance. Jewelry retailer Pandora piloted the tool during the 2022 Valentine’s Day season. Ads placed using the solution represented 2% of campaign spend, but drove 36% of revenue, a 24x return on investment.

You get what you pay for. This adage is considered way too infrequently in the world of digital advertising, especially programmatic. There is so much pressure placed on gaining efficiency, both in execution and cost, that marketers have begun to prioritize “added value” impressions over meaningful business results, writes Elise Stieferman, director of marketing and business strategy at Coegi.

Under COPPA, businesses can’t target ads based on the data of children under 13 years old. Toy manufacturers like WowWee need other ways to get their products in market via advertising, and after testing a YouTube campaign with contextual ad platform Precise TV, the promising results allude to the potential of contextual in targeting ads effectively without audience data, profiles or cookies.

Jay Glogovsky, vice president of revenue operations and analytics for The New York Times, talked to AdExchanger about how The Times relies on direct partnerships to create a positive ad experience for its readers, why open-web programmatic is the wrong choice for a privacy-centric in-app experience and why publishers should double down on close partnerships rather than worry about who will control the keys to monetization.

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 […]

Usually, when people talk to their TV screen, they don’t expect to get an answer back. Voice assistant and smart TV startup Disruptel is aiming to change that with a contextual awareness product for smart TVs called Smart Screen. The company has been beta testing the software, which answers a viewer’s questions about their programming […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Creative Galaxy Snap is fending off competitors with new money-making tools for creators, Variety reports. Next month, Snapchat will launch Spotlight Challenges, cash bonuses ranging from $1,000 to $25,000 for accounts with top views in categories like “Best Trick Shot.” The tool is a […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Andrew Frank, VP distinguished analyst at Gartner. As yesterday’s cross-domain tracking methods fade into history, the entire digital ad community is casting around for a suitable replacement – and marketers trying to navigate through the […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Contextual Seed The contextual ad tech startup Seedtag raised $40 million, Business Insider reports. The Spanish company plans to add 30 employees and expand its US footprint. Before this round, Seedtag had raised $6 million to date. But contextual targeting is a buzzy category, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Party Line The Washington DC Attorney General’s office expanded its antitrust suit against Amazon. The complaint initially targeted Amazon’s third-party seller policies and now also encompasses first-party seller deals. The crux of the AG’s case against Amazon’s first-party seller policies is the “Minimum […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Podcast Talk Podcasting has heated up, with big M&A deals in recent years, including Amazon’s acquisition of Wondery for $300 million and Spotify’s $235 million deal for Megaphone. Podcast advertising is forecasted to exceed $2 billion by 2023, according to emarketer, which revised up […]

Ad verification and measurement provider Integral Ad Science held its first earnings call after going public just over a month ago. Revenue increased 55% to $75.1 million year-over-year. That growth was largely fueled by programmatic revenue, which jumped 94% to $31.8 million compared to the same period last year. Programmatic accounts for 42% of total Q2 revenue, as […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The Olympic Edge During the Olympic Games, Comcast will interrupt its own commercials with near-live highlights and coverage, Variety reports, taking advantage of the fact it owns NBCUniversal and Olympic broadcast rights. “This makes the viewer feel like, ‘How did that just happen? I […]

Music video hosting service Vevo has graduated from the smartphone to the living room. At the start of the pandemic, just 4% of its business came from connected TV. Today, nearly 50% of Vevo’s business comes courtesy of CTV, mainly through numerous distribution partnerships with the likes of Samsung, Pluto TV, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon […]

Podcast discovery can be as challenging for advertisers as it is for consumers. “It’s a mass reach vehicle, but the targeting and anti-targeting that advertisers can do in podcasts has been very manual in nature,” said Claire Fanning, VP of ad innovation strategy at SXM Media, the newly launched unified sales team that combines Pandora, […]

Retargeting might be considered a legacy business, but it held strong for Criteo – and actually grew – during the first quarter of this year. On Criteo’s Q1 earnings call Wednesday, CEO Megan Clarken pointed to the resilience of retargeting as a driver of the company’s growth. Not that retargeting’s rebound wasn’t also somewhat of a surprise. […]

Contextual targeting online dates back more than a decade. But the technique is having a renaissance as marketers test out strategies that work in a cookie-free world. In contextual targeting, a machine scans page content and places a digital ad relevant to that context. Natural language processing allows contextual tech providers to understand nuances of […]

Marketers looking for their customers in contextually relevant environments will be able to do so via a new partnership between Media.net and LiveRamp. Media.net is connecting its contextually-focused exchange to LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution. The combo enables private marketplace buys that have been curated to include both a marketer’s own customers and the contexts they […]