• by Sara Guaglione , November 4, 2020

The Washington Post has introduced a contextual ad targeting product called Project Signal.

“For an advertiser, targeting alongside content in context with an article is going to be the status quo across publishers on the web,” Jarrod Dicker, vice president of innovation and commercial strategy, wrote in a guest blog post introducing the product.

“By understanding consumption behaviors, publishers can build richer opportunities for marketers to better understand not just the context a reader is in, but how that type of reader chooses to watch, read and navigate content throughout the entire web,” he added.

The tool is powered by first-party data from The Washington Post’s contextual targeting platform Zeus Insights. 

Advertisers will receive contextual and consumption insights on WaPo, and then have the opportunity to scale those learnings across the network of publishers on Zeus Prime, an ad buying interface that lets advertisers purchase inventory directly on WaPo in real-time.

“For example, if a brand is running an ad unit that features an editorial article from The Washington Post… we want to enable the brand to swap out articles quickly and easily based on consumption insights,” Dicker wrote.

"Media buyers should come to rely more on first-party data insights — the crucial, actionable data about user consumption habits that publishers can curate and utilize,” he noted.

“By utilizing this technology in parallel with consumption insights, brands are able to be given more real-time control of their content-based ad units when distributed at scale,” Dicker wrote.