Contextual Advertising and Targeting Insights | Peer39 Blog

Automate contextual category recommendations | Peer39 Blog

Written by Peer39 | Jul 21, 2021 2:14:16 PM

Last week, Centro announced the release of their new Basis platform, a first-of-its-kind automatic contextual category recommendation solution that leverages marketers’ historical first-party data about best-performing audiences to inform future targeting strategies–available natively, within a DSP.

Peer39 is proud to partner with Centro to power their Contextual Intelligence software in the Basis platform, and to help provide advertisers with unprecedented transparency into their data and targeting metrics.

What is contextual Intelligence?

Basis is the first demand-side platform to offer contextual category recommendations based on first-party data from advertisers. 

Advertisers can use this feature natively within their DSP to automatically analyze the overall performance of a brand or campaign using metrics like: 

  • Impressions
  • Conversions
  • Completion rates
  • Other KPIs 

Based on that first-party advertiser intelligence, Basis can then predict which contextual targeting categories are likely to perform the best for future campaigns. This analysis is available across all types of ad inventory. 

How will advertisers benefit?

Thanks to Basis and Peer39, advertisers will now have visibility into what cookie-free contextual data signals work best for their target audiences. Using these insights, they can then optimize their campaigns automatically, regardless as to whether or not the original campaign used that type of targeting.

The benefits to advertisers are many, allowing them to:

  • Draw value from first-party audience data by uncovering customer content consumption patterns, and converting them into contextual signals
  • Optimize campaign targets and budgets using previously hidden contextual segments 
  • Analyze those new contextual segments for future marketing efforts
  • Target broader demographics that have similar content consumption habits, unlocking reliable scalability
  • Report performance by the classification of the actual content that ads were placed alongside 

As advertisers head toward the end of third-party cookies – now slated for the middle to end of 2023 – solutions like Centro’s Basis will be critical to ensuring that companies can retain and elevate their current campaign output.

The importance of automated contextual categories in a post-cookie world

As Tyler Kelly, president of Centro, says: cookies are a “blunt instrument” that have made the lives of digital ad professionals easier. 

But, consumers have become more vocal about controlling their privacy on the web in recent years, and have made it clear how they want to be advertised to. Instead of receiving ads from websites that they visited, which may or may not still be of interest to them, consumers are much more likely to engage with content that is relevant to what they’re reading about or watching at the moment.

This is where Centro’s solution comes into play. As a whole, the advertising industry is quickly moving away from third-party cookies. The question is what will replace it. 

Contextual advertising solutions, like this one, can help advertisers get back to the core pillars of advertising, while also providing a more transparent and targeted approach to campaigns created. 

By leveraging their own historical campaign data, and using that to automatically create highly targeted contextual categories, advertisers can show consumers the right ads, in the right place, at the right time, all at a much more reliable and scalable rate than is possible with third-party cookies. 

Because of this, Mario Diez, Peer39’s CEO, called this collaboration with Centro a “landmark initiative” that will provide marketers with the visibility, measurement, insights, and optimization required to bolster their media performance in a cookie-free world.