With the Privacy Act reforms around the corner, Google's backflip in killing off its third-party cookies signals a step back from advancing privacy, according to Niall Hogan, contextual advertising platform GumGum’s GM for JAPAC.
“Stakeholders across the spectrum—regulators, consumers, and brands—have been pushing for more privacy-conscious solutions. Google's decision is a missed opportunity to lead in privacy innovation,” Hogan told AdNews.
“Instead of clinging to outdated practices, the industry should adopt more respectful approaches like contextual advertising.”
Contextual targeting – displaying ads based on the content of a website – is seeing increased interest from the market, with nearly half (47%) of advertisers and marketers increasing spending/emphasis on contextual advertising this year, according to IAB’s most recent Data State of the Nation report.
8 in 10 (79%) are at least somewhat confident that they will have the capabilities to competently leverage contextual targeting opportunities over the next year, with only Market Mix Modelling beating out contextual targeting as the most adopted tool already implemented to manage the changes from signal loss and impending privacy legislation.
Hogan said that if he was an advertiser, one of the reasons he would work with contextual is it's not going to get the brand in any trouble.
“It mitigates risk. There is no personable data collected when contextual signals are taken from videos or off websites or apps, so it's 100% privacy compliant,” he said.
“I think it's going to be an important part of advertisers’ digital armoury moving forward.”
While some advertisers may already be using contextual, Hogan said that the technology has advanced so significantly over the past decade that those who wrote it off in earlier times should reconsider.
“If you go back 10 years ago, contextual was very basic. It was collecting keywords from websites and keywords from the meta tag data behind a video. If you fast forward to today, next generation contextual data is also taking videos and analysing every frame, looking at every image and looking at every spoken word in the audio files,” Hogan told AdNews.
“Contextual today can be applied to CTV, in-game, mobile apps – it can be used across the entire digital plan and I think more and more advertisers will look at it that way.”
Hogan said that for Australian businesses, the challenge isn't about cookies; it's about aligning ad content with genuine user interests.
“Contextual advertising is poised to make these meaningful connections, surpassing the capabilities of third-party cookies, and helping local brands maintain trust and relevance in a privacy-focused market,” he said.
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