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.
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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.
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by AdExchanger // Friday, March 15th, 2019 – 12:06 am “Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today's column is written by Preethy Vaidyanathan, chief product officer at Tapad, a part of Experian For years marketers asked, “How do we get more data?” Now that they've mastered data mining, marketers want to know what’s next. The time has come for organizations to make their abundance of digital data actionable, increase ROI and reach consumers with consistent, personalized experiences across all touchpoints. A seamless consumer experience can only be achieved by consolidating digital data. Organizations, however, are finding that consolidating data silos is more time-consuming and complicated than initially expected. The challenges One of the most pervasive obstacles companies face in when consolidating data is adopting inefficient and costly tactics that quickly become outdated. For instance, over the last couple of years, many companies turned to enterprise data warehouses to consolidate data silos, but some were too expensive or poorly suited for raw, unstructured and semi-structured data. This led companies to adopt data management initiatives, which bogged down many enterprises. Perception among senior level executives is another challenge. Many still question the need for digital transformation – achieving greater efficiencies through updating business and organizational processes with new technologies. Gartner found that more than half (54%) of senior executives say their digital business objective is transformational, while 46% say their objective is optimization. Digital transformation and data consolidation require time and effort. So, many large organizations work to overcome data silos as part of a multiyear digital transformation versus an immediate action item, delaying the benefits the company sees from taking on this project. All of these challenges make delaying progress in data consolidation easy, but companies should remember the impetus for doing so: creating a seamless customer experience that, in turn, drives business results. Brands with higher quality customer experience grow revenue faster than direct competitors with lower quality customer experience. The approach Many brands go into the digital transformation process assuming they have massive amounts of customer data, and that much of it is valuable or will be in the future. They might spend months aggregating that data in data stores or data lakes – at great expense. The trouble is that their data was scattered across multiple databases, which means it’s highly fragmented. As a result of this fragmentation, marketers can’t activate their data in ways that enhance the customer experience. To do so, companies must ensure their digital data is highly flexible so it can provide a holistic view of the consumer journey across every digital, in-store, in-venue and offline channel. I’d recommend that organizations taking on data centralization initiatives prioritize use cases that offer the company the greatest benefit. This is where organizations should establish a “crawl, walk, run” approach to data centralization to ensure key executives buy into the process. Starting with a subset of use cases, such as customer retention or upsell, or with a campaign, which is an even smaller starting point, allows executives to see the benefits of data consolidation projects relatively quickly. Once they validate these initial benefits, they can expand the range of use cases or campaigns, as well as the marketing ROI for their business. While data centralization is a long-term project that may take several years to complete, it doesn’t mean a business can’t get started now and see measurable results quickly. Break down data consolidation into stages so the organization can experience wins along the way. At the end of the day, data consolidation will help organizations deliver more effective marketing campaigns that drive business growth. Contact us today
Tapad's technology enhances Bidtellect clients frequency capping and audience extension capabilities cross device. NEW YORK, Feb. 28, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Tapad, part of Experian, is a global marketing technology company and leader in digital identity resolution solutions, today announced a new partnership with Bidtellect (now Simpli.fi), a leading native Demand-Side Platform (DSP). Bidtellect's paid content distribution platform will leverage The Tapad Graph™ as its first cross-device partner. The integration will offer Bidtellect's clients in the U.S. and Canada cross-device frequency capping and enhanced audience extension capabilities. The combination of Tapad's leading cross-device technology, with Bidtellect's unparalleled scale and optimization capabilities, will allow content marketers within brands and agencies to develop even more strategic, effective content marketing campaigns. The Tapad Graph™ will allow content marketers to gain greater reach and create more relevant, unified messaging with targeted delivery, when used in conjunction with Bidtellect's technology. Marketers can expect to benefit from amplified reach, and enhanced, privacy-safe engagement with desired audiences as a result of this partnership. "Partnering with Tapad, the leaders in cross-device data, provides Bidtellect with a complete solution that leverages both probabilistic and deterministic mapping strategies," said Mike Conway, Chief Technology Officer at Bidtellect. "The Tapad relationship expands our audience size by providing the opportunity to reach the same user across multiple devices and, when used in conjunction with our frequency capping functionality, ensures increased reach, reduced ad saturation, and elimination of wasted ad spend." As the partnership progresses, Tapad will also work with Bidtellect to provide advanced attribution for conversions and engagement metrics including connectivity and amplification. These advanced insights will help brands and agencies develop a more holistic approach to content marketing, so they can build audiences and influence bidding algorithms that directly impact their business. "We're thrilled to be working with Bidtellect as the company's first cross-device partner," said Chris Feo, SVP of Global Data Licensing and Strategic Partnerships at Tapad. "At Tapad, we are continuously advancing our identity resolution solutions to keep pace with the ever-changing needs of marketers. As a part of that commitment, we look to work with partners where our technology is able to enhance their offering to better serve marketers. We are looking forward to creating that superior experience with the Bidtellect team." Contact us today