"With the sun rapidly setting on third-party cookies, a persistent global pandemic, and social and political unrest around the world, there has never been more pressure on brands to ensure that their advertising is not just accurate, but relevant and sensitive. However, the ad industry has proved that it is willing and able to adapt, with firms exploring new solutions to power an ecosystem that serves consumers and companies alike. One such solution that has seen a resurgence amidst tightening privacy regulation is contextual, which offers a more privacy-centric targeting solution by using a website’s contents to determine which ads are served to each end user. Marco Godina (pictured below), SVP of product at Silverbullet talks exclusively to ExchangeWire about the benefits of contextual targeting, and explains why the solution is more than just a placeholder for the near-extinct third-party cookie.
In the wake of the COVID crisis and new privacy regulation, brand safety has become more critical than ever. How do you think industry players are faring when it comes to brand safety, and what do you think they could be doing better?
COVID-19 has really shone a spotlight on how limited some of the current approaches to brand safety are. For starters, much of the industry is still running on simple blocklists, or using outdated technology that only spots and flags individual keywords without assessing their context. Unfortunately, this only serves to misinterpret, or misrepresent what an article is really about – such as instances where articles about Meghan and Harry are blocked because ‘Sussex’ contains the word ‘sex’. Now, in a climate where almost every article is about the global pandemic or political and social unrest, these approaches result in a huge chunk of quality content being unnecessarily dropped, essentially leaving brands with limited places to engage their customers, and publishers with limited ways to monetise their inventory.
Another big problem, which often gets overlooked, is that advertisers are forced to approach brand safety differently based on which channel they’re executing on. The safety and suitability signals available within walled gardens are very different from the signals available on the open web for display – which in turn are very different from the signals that can be used on programmatic video and programmatic audio. As the space evolves, I personally think we’re going to start seeing advertisers demand parity with the way brand safety is managed and executed across all of their digital channels.
On the bright side, we are starting to see newer contextual solutions adopt things like natural language processing, and other advanced techniques that go beyond keywords in order to understand the semantics, context, and sentiment of an article in the way that a human would. We’re also starting to see new tools that are applying innovative approaches to improve understanding of video and audio as well. This is the direction the industry needs to move in – using smarter and more nuanced solutions to help brands find suitable content to advertise alongside (regardless of inventory type), whilst helping publishers monetise meaningful and reputable content."
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