Topic:
Contextual targeting

Cookies (especially third-party cookies) have long been the backbone of digital marketing efforts: behavioral targeting. However, the end of the cookie is near—and so, too, may be the end of behavioral targeting’s reign as digital advertising’s go-to for reaching target audiences.

We recently sat down with Joe Kyriakoza, vice president and general manager of thePolk Automotive Solutions portfolio at S&P Global Mobility - which produces best-in-class automotive audiences to help marketers connect more effectively with consumers.

Programmatic ad spend is continuing to grow, with budgets expected to hit $725 billion in 2026 (up from $418 billion in 2021). Contextual traffic is leading the charge, growing at a CAGR of 18.75% with an estimated global ad spend of $631.44 billion by 2027.

Historically, digital advertisers relied heavily on behavioral targeting - powered by browser cookies This tactic misses the mark for real-time content-consumption relevance to what the user is reading or watching. Users are shown ad content that may not be relevant or applicable in the context or at the time they see it. This is where contextual advertising improves impact.

When we launched the Contextual Data Marketplace®, the goal was to bring privacy-safe data sources to contextual strategies. Experian is our newest Contextual Data Marketplace partner, giving advertisers privacy-safe, cookie-free, location-based data for Purchase Affinity and Demographics categories.

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.

One of the main reasons we created the Contextual Data Marketplace(™) was to bring partners with interesting data sets and sources to the programmatic world. One of our partners, socialcontext.ai, epitomizes that effort and why it’s important to advertisers by offering the ability to target audiences as they read important, socially conscious news. Socialcontext detects diversity, equity and inclusion news content using patent-pending deep learning Socialcontext was built by journalism, advertising, and data science professors at the University of Colorado Boulder. They positively target news articles, and offer unrivaled precision and safety, at no additional cost. As such, Socialcontext allows advertisers to connect with audiences that care about important social issues. By advertising ...

On the heels of our Connected TV Suitability release, we’re delighted to share that advertisers can add more granularity to their CTV campaigns with location-based targeting when using data from applicable Contextual Data Marketplace partners.