Norman Dahmes, Product Manager at Piano, illustrates the resurgence of contextual targeting in digital advertising. He highlights the shift in ad spend towards contextual targeting and the need to serve ads related to the content provided by the publisher. To address privacy concerns and offer effective targeting, Piano developed an improved solution leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and data extraction from articles.

Key Takeaways:

• Shift Towards Contextual Targeting: There is a notable shift in digital advertising spending towards contextual targeting, where ads are served based on the relevance to the content provided by publishers. The assumption is that audiences interested in specific content are also interested in ads semantically related to that content.

• Privacy-Focused Advertising Landscape: Privacy concerns are on the rise, driven by factors like increased adoption of privacy-focused browsers (e.g., Safari, Brave) and government regulations. Google's announcement regarding the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome has a significant impact on AdTech vendors, necessitating a focus on privacy.

• Natural Language Processing and Data Extraction: The data management platform utilizes natural language processing to crawl articles, extract key values, and assign ratings to these values. Extracted key values are stored in structured data sets known as content profiles, available in more than 35 languages. These content profiles are used to enhance user profiles, enabling content recommendation, look-alike modeling, and behavioral segmentation.