By Charlie Pinkney, Global Business Development Director

Customer experience is undeniably one of the hottest topics in the (M)adTech industry right now. Whether your focus is on obtaining quality consumer data to drive personalization or delivering premium advertising in relevant environments to capture attention – the mission remains the same: to provide excellent customer experiences in the moments that matter. 

Despite Google’s recent reversal on their 3p deprecation stance, there has been a significant shift in the marketplace towards striving for a privacy-first, consent-driven future. For some time now, the resurgence of contextual targeting has been touted as a clear strategy for those looking to reach unknown audiences in the contexts they resonate with the most. Why? Well, it offers an innovative solution for the privacy-first era, allowing advertisers to reach unknown audiences through relevant, quality content. 

However, contextual targeting is just one piece of the puzzle. The real excitement begins when you blend contextual targeting and insights with other innovations. 

A Contextual Refresh: 

In its simplest form, contextual advertising is a targeted marketing approach that places ads based on the content of a web page or video, rather than user data. In a privacy-first era, contextual advertising provides a solid alternative to leveraging 3p data. By relying on the context of the page or video, the technology analyses and classifies this content as targetable keywords, and topics, and understands the deeper semantic meaning of said content to deliver relevant ads at the moment the media is being consumed. 

By its very nature, contextual advertising respects user privacy while providing a targeted advertising experience focused on audience interests and intent, ensuring a more transparent and respectful online experience. It’s a win-win.  

The Next-Gen of Contextual: 

Advanced contextual advertising solutions are built on vast data foundations and can also integrate directly with thousands of diverse publishers. Some solutions enable brands to curate their own content environments according to their campaign KPIs for the ultimate user experience. This is where programmatic media curation comes in. 

Due to its very nature, contextual advertising emerges as a privacy-first and brand-safe method for advertisers to collaborate with publishers in reaching targeted audiences within premium and relevant environments. And what’s really exciting is that curation can promote more effective and efficient ad campaigns, allowing for increased relevance and scale. 

Curation provides advertisers and publishers with a more efficient way of conducting the ad buying and selling process. Brands, retailers, publishers, and data providers can combine their first-party data with inventory sourced from third-party publishers within PMPs, which can then be delivered to demand-side platforms (DSPs) as easy-to-activate Deal IDs. 

A Deeper Dive: 

Curation, like contextual targeting, is AI-powered, cookieless, and privacy-centric. For advertisers, it offers improved scale, performance, measurement, and greater control and flexibility, increasing transparency across the entire supply chain, giving those using curation platforms the confidence to transact within a brand-safe environment. 

The benefits don’t stop there. For publishers, curation provides a privacy-conscious approach to monetizing first-party data and offers new revenue streams as demand for curation accelerates. It also offers a solution for inventory commoditization and heightened demand. 

The New King & Queen (and room for one extra?): 

Many have cited contextual targeting combined with first-party data as the next king and queen of (M)adTech—and rightly so. Combining those two worlds creates a fascinating future for truly personalized and relevant experiences for users online.  

With curation in the mix, the outlook of these two worlds colliding is positive. Instead of “two’s company, threes a crowd,” we might be entering a world where the three biggest trends in the industry work together for a better future. 

How it all works together: 

According to ExchangeWire, leveraging predictive audience data for campaign planning was the leading priority for curated media buys across European brands and agency marketers, cited by 43% of respondents.  

Curation is acting like the glue that brings together all the component parts to create greater efficiency and effectiveness. In essence, curation can be driven by both contextual data – used to predict the environments that are most likely to drive campaign outcomes – with earned first-party data (such as spending power, interests, or life stages) – applied on the supply side with greater addressability for predictive audiences. 

Further, curation does not necessarily need to be limited to content, but can also further be refined by using predicted metrics around viewability, view-through rates, expected completion rates, and other relevant campaign metrics to provide the best possible environment for a campaign to run in. 

In summary, by combining contextual targeting, ad curation, and first-party data, advertisers can deliver highly relevant, engaging, and compliant ads that enhance the user experience, improve engagement, and drive better results. This synergy ensures that ads are not just placed based on context but are also continuously optimized for maximum effectiveness.