• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 8, 2022

Tumblr, which Automattic acquired in 2019 from Verizon for $3 million, on Tuesday became the first social platform supported by GumGum’s contextual solution, Verity.

During the coming months, Tumblr’s parent company, Automattic, intends to expand the partnership with GumGum by implementing Verity across WordPress.com, reaching hundreds of millions of users globally.

William Merchan, head of Verity at GumGum, told Search & Performance Marketing Daily that the result of this analysis is a cookieless targeting capability for the Tumblr team to package its inventory for sales based on category, keyword, sentiment, and brand safety threshold. “It sets them up to support advertisers growing needs for contextual targeting,” he said.

Today, Tumblr might have become the first and only social network to leverage Verity, but Merchan feels confident other will follow because they will want to become among those social platforms that change social networks by prioritizing users’ data privacy.

It’s all about impactful ad targeting without relying on consumer data, similar to the move Facebook will make with Basic Ads. “In choosing to partner with us, Tumblr has secured their role as leaders among social networking platforms in an advertising ecosystem that will soon no longer rely on third-party cookies that exploit users' internet history,” Merchan said.

Julia Wilson, vice president of ad partnerships at Automattic, stated that GumGum was the only partner capable of image-level contextual analysis that goes beyond metadata, making it the ideal partner for Tumblr’s "image-centric platform."

The companies announced the partnership today.

Advertisers using Tumblr -- which helped establish GIFs as a popular visual message -- can access technologies that can read video, audio, text, and image signals on a frame-by-frame basis. The partnership includes advanced targeting capabilities across the platform.

As part of this partnership, GumGum becomes the first contextual provider to provide GIF support.

GumGum touts its services as being the first independent ad-tech provider to have achieved the Media Rating Council’s content-level accreditation for contextual analysis, brand safety and suitability.

This means GumGum’s contextual solution, Verity, can analyze all key data signals in digital environments -- including text, image, video and audio.