At A Glance
Experian and Yieldmo collaborate to help marketers navigate signal loss with privacy-safe contextual advertising. By combining Experian’s identity solutions with Yieldmo’s advanced targeting, this collaboration enables effective audience engagement in a world with fewer traditional signals.Note: While third-party cookies are no longer being phased out, this webinar was recorded in 2023 when cookie deprecation was still a key industry focus. The strategies discussed reflect that time frame and remain relevant for addressing broader signal loss challenges.
With major browsers discontinuing support for third-party cookies, marketers must rethink how to identify and engage their audiences. Contextual advertising offers a privacy-safe solution by combining contextual signals with machine learning to deliver highly targeted campaigns. In a Q&A with our experts with eMarketer, Jason Andersen, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Partner Solutions at Experian, and Alex Johnston, Principal Product Manager at Yieldmo, we discuss how contextual advertising addresses signal loss, improves addressability, and delivers better outcomes for marketers.
The macro trends impacting marketers
How important is it for digital marketers to stay informed about the changes coming to third-party cookies, and what challenges do you see signal loss creating?
Jason (Experian): Third-party cookies have already been eliminated from Firefox, Safari, and other browsers, while Chrome has held out. It’s just a matter of time before Chrome eliminates them too. Being proactive now by predicting potential impacts will be essential for maintaining growth when the third-party cookie finally disappears.
Alex (Yieldmo): Third-party cookie loss is already a reality. As regulations like theGeneral Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act(CCPA) take effect, more than 50% of exchange traffic lacks associated identifiers. This means that marketers have to think differently about how they reach their audiences in an environment with fewer data points available for targeting purposes. It’s no longer something to consider at some point down the line – it’s here now! Also, as third-party cookies become more limited, reaching users online is becoming increasingly complex and competitive. Without access to as much data, the CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) that advertisers must pay are skyrocketing because everyone is trying to bid on those same valuable consumers. It’s essential for businesses desiring success in digital advertising now more than ever before.
Solving signal loss with contextual advertising
How does contextual advertising help marketers engage audiences with new strategies like machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)?
Jason (Experian): Contextual advertising helps marketers engage audiences by combining advanced machine learning with privacy-safe strategies. We focus on using AI and machine learning to better understand behavior, respect privacy, and deliver insights. As third-party cookies go away, alternative identifiers are coming to market, like Unified I.D. 2.0 (UID2). These are going to be particularly important for marketers to be able to utilize them. As cookie syncing becomes outdated, marketers will have to look for alternative methods to reach their target audiences. It’s essential to look beyond cookie-reliant solutions and use other options available regarding advertising.
Alex (Yieldmo): There’s been a renaissance in contextual advertising over the last couple of years. Three key drivers are shaping this shift:
- The loss of identity signals is forcing marketers to rethink how they reach audiences.
- Advances in machine learning allow us to analyze more granular contextual signals, identifying patterns that are most valuable to advertisers.
- Tailored models now use these signals to deliver more effective campaigns. This transformation is occurring because of our ability to capture and operate on richer, more detailed data.
Reach consumers with advanced addressability
How does advanced contextual advertising help marketers reach non-addressable audiences?
Jason (Experian): Advanced contextual advertising helps marketers reach non-addressable audiences by taking a set of known data (identity) and drawing inferences from it with all the other signals we see across the bidstream. It’s about using a small seed set of customers, those who have transacted with you before or match your target audience, and training contextual models to make the unknown known. Now we can go out and find users surfing on any of the other sites that traditionally don’t have that identifier for that user or don’t at that moment in time and start to be able to advertise to them based on the contextually indexed data.
Alex (Yieldmo): I think the exciting opportunity for many people in the industry is figuring out how to reach your known audience in a non-addressable space, that is based on environmental and non-identity based signals, that helps your campaign perform. Machine learning advancements allow you to take your small sample audience and uncover those patterns in the non-addressable space. High-quality, privacy-resilient data sets are critical for building these campaigns. Companies like Experian, with deep, rich training data, are well positioned to support advertisers in building extension audiences.
Creative strategies that improve ad performance
Why does creative strategy remain essential for digital advertising success?
Jason (Experian): Creative strategy remains essential because it provides valuable signals for targeting and engages audiences effectively. In this advanced contextual world, good creative in the proper ad format that you can test and learn from is paramount. It comes back to that feedback loop. We can use that as another signal in this equation to develop and refine the right set of audiences for your targeting needs.
Alex (Yieldmo): Creative and ad formats are powerful signals for understanding audience engagement. At Yieldmo, we collect interaction data every 200 milliseconds, such as scrolling behavior or time spent on an ad. This data fills the gap between clicks and video completions, helping us build models that predict downstream actions. Tailoring creative to specific audience groups has always been one of the best ways to improve performance, and it remains essential in this new era of contextual advertising. Throughout my career, I learned that designing or tailoring your creative to different audience groups is one of the best ways to improve performance. We ran many lift studies with analysis to understand how you can tailor creative customized for individual audiences. That capability and the ability to do that on an identity basis is.
Our recommendations for actionable marketing strategies
Do you have recommendations for marketers building out their yearly strategies or a campaign strategy?
Jason (Experian): My recommendation for marketers building out their yearly strategies is to be proactive and start testing and learning these new solutions now. I mentioned addressability and being in the right place at the right time. That’s easier in today’s third-party cookie world. But as traditional identity is further constricted, you will have these first-party solutions that will not be at scale, so you’re less likely to find your user at the scale you want. It would be best if you thought about how to reach that user at the right place at the right time. They may not be seen from an identity basis. They might not be at the right place at the right time when you were delivering or trying to deliver an ad. But you increase your chance of reaching them by building these advanced contextual targeting audiences using this privacy-safe seed ‘opted-in’ user set; this is a way to cast that wider net and achieve targeted scale.
Alex (Yieldmo): Build your seed lists, test your formats with different audiences, and understand what’s resonating with whom. Take advantage of some of the pretty remarkable advances in machine learning that are allowing us, really, for the first time to fully uncork the potential and the opportunity with contextual in a way that we’ve never done before.
Contact us
About our experts
Jason Andersen
Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives and Partner Solutions, Experian
Jason Andersen heads Strategic Initiatives and Partner Enablement for Experian Marketing Services. He focuses on addressability and activation in digital marketing and working with partners to solve signal loss. Jason has worked in digital advertising for 15+ years, spanning roles from operations and product to strategy and partnerships.
Alex Johnston
Principal Product Manager, Yieldmo
Alex Johnston is the Principal Product Manager at Yieldmo, overseeing the Machine Learning and Optimization products. Before joining Yieldmo, Alex spent 13 years at Google, where he led the Reach & Audience Planning and Measurement products, overseeing a 10X increase in revenue. During his time, he launched numerous ad products, including YouTube’s Google Preferred offering. To learn more about Yieldmo, visit www.yieldmo.com.
About Yieldmo
Yieldmo is an advertising platform that fuses media and creative to meet audiences in the moments that matter. Using proprietary data and AI, Yieldmo uses advanced targeting to deliver context-aware creative when and where it’s most effective, all while respecting user privacy. The result: ads that belong on inventory brands trust. For more information, please visit www.yieldmo.com.
Contextual advertising FAQs
Contextual advertising works by targeting audiences based on the content they’re engaging with, rather than relying on personal identifiers or traditional tracking methods. Yieldmo’s platform uses advanced contextual signals and machine learning to deliver relevant ads in privacy-safe ways.
Contextual advertising addresses signal loss by focusing on environmental and content-based signals instead of relying on thir-dparty cookies or other traditional identifiers. Experian’s identity solutions complement this approach by enabling marketers to connect with audiences in a compliant and scalable way.
Creative is important in contextual advertising because it engages audiences and provides valuable signals for targeting. Yieldmo’s platform collects interaction data, such as scrolling and time spent on ads, to refine campaigns and improve performance.
Marketers can reach non-addressable audience through advanced contextual targeting, which uses known data, like seed audiences, to identify patterns and extend reach. Experian’s identity solutions and contextual data from, Audigent, a part of Experian, help marketers connect with these audiences in privacy-safe and effective ways.
Latest posts
Commerce media networks have had a strong start. Growth has been fast, demand has been strong, and brands have made it clear they want closer access to commerce-driven audiences. But as more networks mature and enter the space, many are starting to feel the same pressure point: scale. Most commerce media networks were built as managed service businesses. That model works well early on. High-touch, white-glove partnerships make sense when you’re working with a handful of strategic brands. But there’s a ceiling. There are only so many teams, only so much inventory, and only so many advertisers that model can realistically support. It’s one thing for a large retailer to build custom programs for a P&G. It’s another to do that at scale for hundreds or thousands of brands. At some point, growth slows, not because demand disappears, but because the model can’t stretch any further. The scale problem no one likes to talk about That’s where many commerce media leaders find themselves today. Pausing to assess what comes next. For a long time, growth has been measured almost entirely through media dollars. That mindset is understandable. Media is familiar, it's easy to quantify. It shows up clearly in negotiations and revenue reports. But viewing commerce media networks purely as media sales engines creates long-term risk. It can strain brand relationships, limit innovation, and distract from what commerce media networks actually do better than almost anyone else: understand consumers deeply. Signals are the real asset Commerce platforms sit close to decision-making. They see what people search for, what they consider, what they buy, and when those behaviors change. Those signals are incredibly powerful. And yet, most networks only activate them inside their own walled environments. That’s a missed opportunity. Curation represents the next area of growth for commerce media networks, and it doesn’t require replacing or diminishing existing media revenue. In fact, it complements it. No single commerce media network has all the data needed to give advertisers the scale and reach they're looking for. And no advertiser wants to recreate the same audience in dozens of disconnected platforms. That friction creates inefficiency and slows decision-making. Why collaboration supports sustainable growth The opportunity is to look beyond first-party data alone and start thinking about collaboration. Second-party data. Data partnerships. Signal sharing done responsibly and transparently. Imagine an advertiser defining an audience once and being able to understand and reach that audience across multiple commerce environments. Not through a series of disconnected buys, but through a more consistent approach built on shared understanding leading to increased reach and more impactful campaigns. That’s easier for advertisers to manage, and it creates an additional revenue stream for commerce media networks that complements media sales rather than competing with them. Curation strengthens media, it doesn't replace it Media will always play an important role. There is clear value in custom experiences tied directly to a commerce environment. Think buyouts, sponsored experiences, custom creative integrations. Those are situations where brands want to work closely with the network itself. But the signals commerce media networks hold don’t need to be limited to those moments. Those signals can be monetized independently through data products, co-ops, and partnerships that extend their value into other channels. That’s how curation adds value without undercutting existing revenue. A practical path forward for commerce media leaders For commerce media leaders thinking about their next phase of growth, the focus should be on sustainability. Building a massive media operation takes time and investment. Data-driven revenue streams can be introduced more quickly, require fewer internal resources, and provide steadier margins. It’s a practical approach. Use signal-based revenue to fund growth. Let that revenue support investment in tooling, talent, and media innovation over time. Bootstrapping, in the truest sense. Why transparency matters early There’s also a broader responsibility here. In many advertising channels, transparency followed growth, often after pressure from the market. Commerce media networks have an opportunity to do this differently. To lead with transparency from the start. To be clear with brands and consumers about how data is used, how signals are created, and how value flows through the ecosystem. Because the reality is this: commerce media networks are holding some of the most valuable intent signals in the market today. But those signals don’t retain their value in isolation. 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Kevin is known for building cohesive, accountable teams and leading with optimism, clarity, and a strong sense of shared purpose. His leadership philosophy centers on empowering people, driving positive outcomes for clients and fostering a culture where teams can grow, take smart risks, and succeed together. Latest posts
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