• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 1, 2020

At a time when many advertisers, agencies and publishers are looking for privacy-friendly alternatives to targeting media audiences, Universal McCann’s Primis unit today unveiled a new contextual targeting technology for promoting video content discovery and consumption.

While the solution lacks a jargony ad-tech naming convention, the solution is simply called “Contextual Targeting for Advertisers,” and segmenting audiences based on the content they are interested in and drawn to, not what the user’s identities or behaviors are.

In addition to being privacy-agnostic, the contextual targeting method is a simple solution for targeting relevant audiences in what many expect to be a “cookie-less” world, following Google’s deprecation of browser cookies.

Instead of targeting individual user attributes, the platform segments audiences by targeting video content attributes including:

• Content provider
• Page title
• Keywords on the page
• Category of page
• Category of video

“Privacy has become the defining issue of our time in this industry,” Primis co-CEO Eyal Betzalel states, adding: “Between the fall of the third party cookie and the rising skepticism regarding user tracking, we had to adapt and provide a big solution for our demand partners. Contextual targeting is the only realistic solution to this problem that provides both highly focused targeting and respectful treatment of user privacy.”