MEMBER RESEARCH: ROAST and Teads - The enduring effectiveness of contextual targeting

Whilst GDPR compliance has been front of mind for most marketers since its announcement, advertisers have been seeking a solution to the imminent lack of data.. The two businesses carried out the study to understand the enduring effectiveness and relevancy of contextual targeting.

Lucy Cunningham, Head of Mobile and Display at ROAST said: “We know GDPR will disrupt the very basis of the programmatic audience buying we’ve become accustomed to – the data that underpins it. Cookies and IDFAs are used to track individuals across the web and, previously, web browsers and mobile operating systems had allowed wide scope for them to be used as advertising identifiers. The GDPR re-categorises both cookies and IDFAs as personally-identifiable information, and therefore restricts their use, unless the user offers explicit consent.”

Amy Pearce, Account Director at Teads continued “Historically Teads have built a business based on contextual buys, meaning a large part of their proposition needs no change. The 3rd party data that Teads overlays will be GDPR-verified, allowing access to users who have opted in to have their data collected and used for advertising purposes. We decided to partner together to run a piece of activity which would test our assumptions about the two main approaches to media buying.”

The study ROAST and Teads carried out proved the hypothesis that, by using a carefully curated white list, you can run contextual targeting which will perform as strongly as a media buy using a 3rd party data overlay. Using a complex ranking methodology pre-campaign, the two companies examined contextual buys, taking into consideration site speed, ad density and other factors vs. a 3rd party data overlay buy.