DoubleVerify launches contextual advertising solution

DoubleVerify seeks to help publishers monetize their inventory by offering highly relevant topics to advertisers.

Chat with MarTechBot

DoubleVerify, the platform known for supporting ad viewability and brand safety and combatting ad fraud this week launched Custom Contextual targeting for its DV Publisher Suite. With the demise of cookies, more precise contextual advertising is one way to reach relevant audiences without infringing on privacy.

Going beyond keyword analysis, Custom Contextual will lean on DoubleVerify’s Semantic Science engine which categorizes content into some 200,000 concepts. The solution is expected to help publishers monetize their inventory by offering highly relevant topics to specific advertisers.

The Semantic Science ontology includes seasonal categories like Halloween, as well as in-market categories. For example, it can identify content, the consumption of which is consistent with purchase intent — such as reviews.

Why we care. It remains an open questions whether there are alternatives to third-party cookies which can even come close to matching their effectiveness in targeting relevant audiences. There are concerns that identity resolution solutions based on first-party data will sacrifice reach for precision, and thanks to delays in Google’s development timeline no-one quite knows yet how FLoC would work in practice.

Contextual ads, of course, have been around just about forever (think about how “soap-operas” got their name), but it’s better supported by technology than ever before, and of course presents no threat to consumer privacy. Maybe it’s a next-big-thing.


About the author

Kim Davis
Staff
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.

Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

Get the must-read newsletter for marketers.