SAN FRANCISCO, CA — After 10 years of obsessively super-targeting audiences using digital profiling data, the ad industry pendulum is swinging a little back to an older method.<\/p>\n
Contextual targeting is the practice of aligning an ad with\u00a0content<\/em>, not with the individual\u00a0audience<\/em> member consuming that content.<\/p>\n In truth, the outcome doesn’t have to be an “either-or”. Context and audience targeting can co-exist.<\/p>\n The trouble with that?<\/p>\n “One of the problems that people experience when they try and do that really quickly is limitation of scale,” says Daniel Oakins<\/a>, VP of product and strategy at ZEFR.<\/p>\n “A few years ago, there was only the technology to target contexts or audiences, but the technology in order to do it together, and open up scale.<\/p>\n “Now we’re starting to see small tools that allow buyers to be able to hit the right audience, and hit the right scale and hit the right context.”<\/p>\n So, how can the context of content get targeted in an era when ad buyers still want to use digital tools to do so?<\/p>\n ZEFR developed technology that analyzes video content more deeply than surface-level metadata allows, to get more detailed criteria that can inform a targeting decision.<\/p>\n The system uses machine learning plus human review to analyze and meta data to millions of videos. This year, Zefr launched its own Context DMP.<\/p>\n