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Yes! Contextual Targeting (target based on what I am reading) could work, although the industry seems to be clinging to Behavioural Targeting (target based on w
by rpastuszak 7y ago
Yes! Contextual Targeting (target based on what I am reading) could work, although the industry seems to be clinging to Behavioural Targeting (target based on who I am). This will become more important for Open Web due to the 3p cookie constraints, regulatory changes etc..., but Google/Amazon/FB are less likely to be impacted.
In fact Contextual Targeting predates the current approaches, but it became less important once advertises/adtech companies started preaching the thinly veiled idea of using behaviourism to trigger conversions/less products.
Changes like this are slow to introduce due to technical and (mainly) structural/cultural issues in the Advertising Industry, but that’s a topic for an entire essay/series of blog posts.
Source: I work in AdTech and deal with privacy/the ethical impact of programmatic, content monetisation models. Opinions obv. mine.
- la_barba 7y agoYes, we can do contextual targeting, but after that, what are the ways to improve upon the outcomes (from an advertisers standpoint) without violating privacy?
- rpastuszak 7y agoDepends on the outcomes/metrics they’re interested in. For instance, I genuinely believe that targeting based on content is less dangerous from brand safety/brand perception perspective. How about conversions, sweet $$? I think replacing audiences with a semantic targeting model (nlp) could perform almost as good (if not better). Behavioural Targeting performance is overrated (feel free to look it up, esp. CPM vs. conversions, it’s quite interesting, I’m on holiday and shouldn’t be sitting on HN anyway!). Another, deeper point-how much advertising do we (or brands) really need? Do alternatives exist, are they expensive/hard? What problem does advertising solve? I know this sounds like a silly question, but I think it’s worth asking given the current technical landscape and the ethical impact.
- la_barba 7y agoWell.. I'm totally OK with the efficiency in online-advertising being low. My point was that after a certain point, there is no way to get a better ad-to-viewer match without violating privacy. Google was never on the right side of privacy, and given the business they're in, they never will be.
- shostack 7y agoMind sharing which company you work for? I'm interested in scaling contextual, privacy-focused publisher targeting solutions. On the PG/PMP side, the usage is obvious, but I'm also curious what it will take for publisher-provided data to be trusted in the open exchange environment where historically advertisers and DSPs have tended to not trust the publisher-supplied categorization.