Advertising Week: Why Video-Level Data Is an Immediate Panacea for Privacy and Brand Safety Concerns

As Marketer Concerns Rise to the Fore, the Call for Better Contextual Targeting is Answered

The following is an excerpt from a column written by IRIS.TV Co-Founder and CEO Field Garthwaite in Advertising Week.

In mid-January, lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act (BSAA), an unprecedented piece of legislation that would ban the use of personal data when serving advertisements to American citizens. The bill is unlikely to pass in its current form; however, it is a symbol of a broader movement reshaping the advertising industry. Together with the coming end of cookies, the BSAA should serve as a wake-up call for advertisers to prepare now for a future in which individual targeting based on personal data is verboten.

While marketers could focus on the impact of the proposed legislation on current targeting and attribution practices, the BSAA also shines a spotlight on a tool that should have growing importance going forward: contextual targeting. Rather than using anonymized personal information from individual consumers, contextual targeting relies on the relevance of the content itself to reach an intended audience. And the more detailed that data is, the more precise and secure the targeting is.

The Drive Toward Content and Context

Every ad campaign across digital video and connected TV (CTV) involves a triangle of factors for success: audience, content and context. Over the last few years, marketers have focused primarily on audience — investing time, money and technology in defining audiences as precisely as possible using personal behavioral data. However, new legislation and technology headwinds–most notably the aforementioned coming death of third-party cookies–make this focus on audience a risky long-term endeavor. As a result, the ad tech and CTV ecosystem are working to replace the importance of audience information by strengthening the other two elements of the triangle: content and context...

Read the full piece in Advertising Week