A new article on
Marketing Land reports that as cookies look set to disappear forever, publishers are urgently looking for alternative ways to understand their audiences. Contextual advertising has emerged as one possibility. Instead of relying on knowing who is looking at ads, contextual analysis concentrates on where ads get looked at - or in what context.
Phil Bohn is SVP of Sales and Revenue at Mediavine, and he offered some insights on AI-powered contextual advertising to the author. His agency has just partnered with GumGum to apply AI in the contextual advertising space:
"The AI adds a layer of comfort for marketers. Yes we can say, we have three thousand food sites, and this is a food blog or a food article, but to drill down and find more information about it is where the AI comes in. Cool, it's a baking article, but is it sweet, is it chicken? The kind of information an advertiser might be looking for."
|
GumGum's tool is named Verity, and it works by reading text using natural language processing and then analyses images and metadata so it can identify contextual data. As Bohn puts it:
"You can find 'earthquake' and rule that out as a page you want to place an ad on, but to look and know that there's an earthquake cake, and put that into context, makes a big difference. We build a lot of our own products. We built our own video players for instream and outstream, we built our own wrapper infrastructure. So we had to talk about, is this something we build in house? We probably could have pulled it off, but it would have required quite a bit of resources."
|
Mediavine also announced it's bringing its proprietary Grow.me audience engagement framework to the deal. Bohn explains that users are far more ready to give up personal information on a site like The New York Times than to read content from a blog:
"The rationale behind Grow.me is to build something open to scale -- we're going to open this up to other publishers, not just the 8,000 Mediavine sites -- that will nudge people into giving their email address, and give them privacy tools to opt in and opt out. We have 1,800 publishers using Grow.me right now. We talked to The Trade Desk, and they realize there's a whole lot of sites they're not getting first-party data from, and so we built this and became the first publisher to integrate with UID 2.0."
|