We recently sat down with Josh Rosen, President of Reticle - a brand intelligence firm specializing in A.I.-informed emotional content. Reticle was developed out of Hotspex Media to address the growing need of connecting emotional relevance intent of advertisements to contextual environments.

Chris Vargo is an associate professor of advertising and analytics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He teaches in the College of Communication, Media and Information and the Leeds School of Business. His courses focus on marketing, machine learning, news, and media analytics. He is a co-founder and CEO of socialcontext and a Partner in Peer39’s Contextual Data Marketplace. We spent some time with Chris recently to learn more about socialcontext and the work he’s bringing together for the digital media industry.

The internet has made it easy for anyone who wants to build a platform to share ideas and information as ad-supported content. While this is generally a positive development, it also presents brands with the challenge of ensuring they aren’t funding harmful content. So, while behavioral targeting and automation have expanded the opportunities available to brands, these advances came with a need to address brand safety. The use of blocking, either keywords or domains, assured advertisers that they’d managed their risk. But it comes at a cost. The detrimental impact of legacy tactics Nothing has illustrated the limitations of keyword blocking better than the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a legacy practice that was employed in the beginning when almost every story had some ...

Every day brings us closer to the time when cookies aren’t an option for advertisers anymore. The news of cookies going away isn’t all bad, though. After all, cookies have their fair share of problems in terms of relevance for consumers. Just about everyone has a story like one of these: You buy something and then see ads for the item you’ve purchased all over the sites you visit for days or weeks. You buy a gift for someone—let’s say it’s your 10-year-old niece—and you start seeing ads related to that gift you have no interest in anymore. You’re a parent working full time and do searches at home related to your child’s needs and the ads follow you around while you work at the office. Not ideal, is it? While research shows consumers want personalized ads, there’s a growing unwillingness ...

This year has been intense when it comes to news coverage, especially with so much reporting around the pandemic, politics, and protests. The sensitive nature of these news topics has made advertisers particularly reticent about placing ads on news content. We saw it in the early days of the pandemic when blocklists were used to protect brands from negative coronavirus stories. The challenge with this avoidance approach is that publishers rely on the ad revenue to support their ability to report on all those very topics. The use of inclusion/exclusion lists creates risk for credible information sources we need right now. More importantly, it locks you out of the highest quality content for ad placements, reducing your impression pool. So, what’s an advertiser to do? No news is bad news ...

The outbreak of coronavirus and its pandemic status have had an abrupt progression in the news. Since January, we’ve seen the topic evolve from regular updates on news about somewhere else in the world to become the overwhelmingly dominant story in every country. This massive growth in volume of coverage has created a backlash among advertisers who are responding by creating comprehensive block lists of terms related to the virus or, in more extreme cases, ceasing all ad spend on publishers. This kind of extreme reaction is meant to prevent the kind of damage to their brand’s reputation that can occur if their ads are served on pages alongside articles about the tragedy and economic impact of this global crisis. It’s understandable that advertisers are wary. Every brand seeks to be seen ...