With the “cookieless web” just around the corner, the push towards disabling user tracking in browsers and apps, combined with stringent data privacy regulations, has compelled publishers to seek new methods to create addressable audiences.
The grim reality…. The loss of cookie-based targeting without viable alternatives can harm publishers’ CPMs and negatively impact total ad revenue. It will become increasingly difficult to reach target audiences without cookies, and due to this, advertisers may opt for walled gardens with substantial first-party data pools. According to a study conducted by Google, publishers may lose up to 52% of revenues after the loss of third-party cookies.
The good news is, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The answer to delivering relevant, timely recommended content without risking privacy can be found in contextual targeting [specifically through non-user segment matching]. Contextual targeting, which leverages publishers’ first-party data to match advertising with on-page content, is not a new concept. However, the improvements in contextualized machine learning reveals huge promise in precision and granularity.
The MGID team has been tirelessly working behind the scenes on a solution to cross the cookieless divide. The idea behind our solution – to keep the benefits of traditional contextual targeting with the goal of rebuilding it as a viable advertising solution in a post-cookie world. The end result, a Contextual Intelligence solution for native advertising, which goes above and beyond contextual signals.
Contextual Targeting, SUPERCHARGED!
Introducing Contextual Intelligence by MGID, a proprietary contextual targeting solution that uses A.I. algorithms to extract meaningful content of an article and evaluate(s) its context and sentiment. The content is then identified and labeled based on MGID’s proprietary content taxonomy, which goes well beyond the current standard of today’s contextual targeting solutions.
Current contextual solutions require a strong, human element, to assign content categories to each document. However, this approach is not scalable (with 1.7 billion websites worldwide and an average of 575K more coming online everyday). Layer this with a high probability that each site contains pages that relate to a wide array of topics. Simply put, it would take an army of people to accurately classify this.
MGID’s Contextual Intelligence solution addresses the cookieless dilemma with a machine learning approach. This is done by curating 100s of URLs to train our intelligence tool on a topic of interest. To ensure quality of that data, we utilize a separate set of URLs (an approximate number to the first set) to test and verify accuracy. After this process is complete, our Contextual Intelligence feature recognizes the topic automatically on any page or document we feed to it. From there, the entire list of our publisher sites can be indexed against the topic on that same day.
In addition, our solution has the ability to rank every page in terms of its relevance to the desired contextual category. The bids are then set in proportion to this relevance. This way, MGID's contextual campaigns achieve full scale and generate higher ROAS.
Meeting Publishers NEEDS!
There are multiple benefits to MGID’s Contextual Intelligence for publishers in particular:
Natural Privacy Protection: Through direct partnerships with our publishers, MGID relies on their first-party contextual data rather than personal data. Our Contextual Intelligence solution combines content types, topics, and entities such as people and products with sentiment analysis of the information on the page and subsequently sorts audiences into segments based on interests, not personal data.
Publisher Audience Insights: Relying on context to make targeting decisions, advertisers give more power to publishers. Therefore, publishers can take into account advertisers’ demand when planning their editorial strategy. Contextual Intelligence by MGID also opens the doors for small, niche publishers to gain ad revenue because they will have content that is contextually relevant for very specific audiences.
Direct Demand from Premium Advertisers: Trusted by global and local advertisers, we make sure they reach their target audiences at scale. At the same time, we grant our publishers an opportunity to monetize their content and maximize their yield by selling inventory to the highest-bidding advertisers. What's more, contextual targeting is widely used for brand awareness campaigns (both display and video), and eCPMs of such campaigns are higher.
As a result, Contextual Intelligence by MGID enables publishers to retain the value of ad inventory, increase average CPM after the demise of third-party cookies. Moreover, there are no revenue losses on the way since there are no other data providers between a publisher, an advertiser, and our platform.
To Sum Up
The phase-out of 3rd-party cookies will affect the entirety of digital advertising: From campaign planning, audience targeting, attribution, and ad performance measurement. Most of the users on the open web will become unidentifiable.
MGID’s Contextual Intelligence solution provides a simple answer to this dilemma, ensuring an even value exchange between the advertiser, the publisher, and the consumer.
