Content Ignite launch Contextual Audience Segmentation for Publishers

As of June 2022 we are, in all likelihood, looking at the deprecation of the cookie over the next 12–18 months. From our own discussions with publishers and articles published in AdTech publications, many publishers are still struggling to find cost-effective solutions or create strategies to prepare for the “cookie apocalypse”.

Every member of our senior team has worked on the publisher side in the past. We know and understand the struggles that publishers have to continually go through with never-ending cycles of Google algorithm updates, Facebook news feed updates, GDPR challenges and now — the death of the cookie.

We are committed to creating solutions for publishers that aren’t focussed solely on squeezing every last drop of revenue out of each publisher we work with. Absolutely, we have to create a profitable company but we also need to be helping create profitable publishers as without them — we simply won’t survive.

About 12 months ago, we started conceptualising and creating our contextual product for publishers but we faced many challenges.

Challenges building a Contextual Audience Segmentation Solution

1. How do we provide a solution that works with the publishers existing ad stack?
2. How do we store all of this data?
3. How do we structure the contextual data?
4. How granular should and can we go in our segmentation?

Solution for building a Contextual Audience Segmentation Solution

1. RE: Existing Ad Stacks — From publisher feedback, it’s hard to find any publishers not using Google Ad Manager (GAM) for their adserver. It’s the market leader by a long stretch so currently, we only support GAM but we’d love to speak to more adservers in the future.
2. RE: Storage — We hold all of the contextual data in Google BigQuery. BigQuery is incredibly powerful and our whole infrastructure is powered by Google Cloud. It just made sense.
3. RE: Structure — Our CTO, Jamie Druce, conceptualised Segments and Audiences. One or many Segments can make up an Audience but also many Segments can make up a parent Segment. The potential make-up of an Audience is then infinite. You can create one Segment containing an article about the ‘vehicle’ that equals ‘Tesla Vehicles’ and another Segment containing the ‘vehicle’ that equals ‘Polestar Vehicles’ and a parent Segment named ‘Electric Vehicles’ — which contains both ‘Tesla Vehicles’ and ‘Polestar Vehicles’. An Audience called ‘Automotive Vehicles’ could then contain ‘Electric Vehicles’ and ‘Petrol Vehicles’ etc.
4. RE: Segmentation — Our focus was around three main areas;
   - Entity Filters[Organisations & Publisher Websites]
   - Publisher Filters [IAB Categories & URL Paths]
   - Contextual Filters [Contextual Categories e.g. Vehicle, Person etc or Contextual Terms e.g. Tesla or Polestar]

Summary & Usage

The structure and segmentation are key. In the following example, if you are a news site and you have Politics, Lifestyle, Motoring etc sections, you can;

• select URL Paths to create a ‘Motoring’ segment using /motoring/* to select any of your pages on your site containing ‘Motoring’ content
• select a Contextual Category of Vehicle
• select a Contextual Term of anything matching Tesla*

From this, you could create an Audience called Motoring — Tesla with the key-value pair of motoring=tesla . This audience is pushed into your GAM every time a URL and our contextual on-page intelligence is matched, giving you and your advertisers hyper-specific advertising across your publisher websites.

Not only can these audiences be used in your direct campaigns but on PMP (Private Auctions), Preferred Deals, Programmatic Guaranteed with key-values pushed in the Prebid too.

Caveats

To provide this service, our Content Ignite (CI) tags need to be used. CI, by default, serve GAM ad units to page but our tags provide these extra features that GAM doesn’t provide ‘out of the box’.

Choice, Transparency & Control

One thing we pride ourselves on at CI is the choice, transparency and control we provide our publishers.

Choice

• Run YOUR own ad demand in YOUR Google AdManager through our ad units.
• Or use Content Ignite full-stack monetisation.
• Or a hybrid model running your campaigns with our monetisation.

Transparency

• Visible revenue shares for any monetisation available in platform.
• Usage-based pricing charges for SaaS are itemised clearly for each day — only pay for what you use.

Control

• Self-Serve Publishing Cloud — you are in full control and can see every ad unit that’s running. We don’t run new ad units into your site without your visibility!
• Simple ad unit configuration — you can change the targeting, run in-image every other image or every 3 images, this is in your control.
• Easily turn ad units on and off — does what it says on the tin, full control and visibility
• One script on page— our tech can go crazy granular. Put one script down and through our ‘Configs’ - target ads to specific URLs or sections of your site, choose which devices and even which geos to target. If you want to target In-Image advertising to your Motoring section, on any URLS containing ‘tesla’, on mobile, in the UK, in your own GAM or ours — this is all possible.

Closing Statement

The death of cookie is on the horizon but it needn’t be scary.

We strive to create a product that works for any publisher of any size. It doesn’t matter if you have no developers, 1 developer or 10. You can put 1 script down on page and the monetisation and GDPR-compliant possibilities are endless.

We fully believe that publishers should have the ability to be fully in control of all aspects of monetisation on their site. In conjunction with that belief, we have built a contextual solution which provides that same choice, transparency and control.

Whilst in beta, we aren’t charging our publishers for our contextual solution. We are looking to gain as much feedback as possible from publishers (and advertisers, agencies & brands). Feel free to reach out at https://contentignite.com/contact-us if you want to learn more and partner with CI during this beta period.

Future Contextual Development

At CI, we fully believe in the Seller Defined Audiences initiative from the IAB and we will endeavour to support this by creating pre-defined audiences that match the taxonomy in the coming months.

https://www.iabuk.com/news-article/iab-tech-lab-releases-seller-defined-audiences

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