Commentary

Vibrant Media Develops Custom Contextual Targeting Technique Using Search Data

Vibrant Media will announce a new suite of cookieless audience-targeting solutions on Monday to support advertisers through contextual data and privacy-safe advertising processes.

The company, which works with international brands like Audi and Nokia, has launched deterministic and search-intent audience-targeting capabilities through its Quintesse platform.

The technology analyzes the global bitstream and finds relevant publishers to a specific advertising campaign, explains Doug Stevenson, CEO and co-founder of Vibrant Media, founded in 2000 based on supporting brands through contextual media.

“We use lemmatization, a natural-language processing tool,” says Stevenson, who believes this is the most sophisticated way to best understand the contextual meaning of words in an article.

Accuracy has historically relied on keywords and looking at URLs, but “the process ran into a lot of problems with brand-safety companies,” he said. This process takes less than 3 milliseconds to match the ad with the query."

advertisement

advertisement

Stevenson defines the word “contextual” by analyzing the etymology of the word, when content and the advertiser come together.

As third-party cookies near the end of their existence in 2023, the U.S. programmatic digital display ad market will exceed $115 billion in 2022. The billion-dollar industry requires new privacy-safe targeting techniques that operate without cookies.

“Topics with a capital ‘T’ is something people talk about now because Google decided to call their new targeting solution Topics,” said Richard Brindley, CIO and UK general manager of Vibrant Media. “It’s the same thing we’ve been doing for years.”

The intent of the user is divided into sub-topic, which makes them targetable, Brindley said.

Vibrant Media solutions begin with a purely contextual approach.

The deterministic audiences and search-intent audiences can be used on their own or combined with Vibrant Media’s Curated Brand Marketplaces and custom contextual targeting. These targeting solutions are activated programmatically today on more than 240 different DSPs.

The Quintesse platform sorts pages into more than 740 categories to identify the ideal contextual environments at scale for its advertisers. The detailed understanding of which topics on each page are related allows the technology to create user maps leveraged for deterministic audience targeting based on interests.

The platform uses a cookieless process to connect users to topics of interest in across all browsers, including mobile apps and connected TV (CTV).

The technology matches users to interests based on the number of exposures to the specific category over a specific time period.

When asked whether brands are testing or using the ability to use search data with CTV, Brindley said "it's something we're very interested in."

Vibrant Media uses search technology to determine the pages that most closely match a marketers’ specific search keywords.

The Quintesse platform has the capability to build a map of those pages, identifying the ideal combinations of keywords in the set likely to return the most relevant results.

Consumers visiting multiple tagged pages across the web are mapped to specific search terms and added to an audience pool. Users are weighted based on the number of pages they visit and the strength of the connection between the page and the search terms.

Interest and intent user maps based on keywords are used to help marketers target audience pools that have searched for the relevant terms on any page they are visiting after that search, rather than just buying clicks for the specific keyword.

“It’s based on deterministic and search-intent audience targeting,” Brindley said. “There are words that define intent like buy and purchase, and others that strongly convey interest like review and pair. If you can find those with subject matters, you can get to the match.”

 

Next story loading loading..