Contextual Targeting Offers the Most Viable Advertising Strategy in the
GDPR Era
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has
changed the way businesses can handle the personal data of the citizens of the
European Union. Any individual, company or organization, whether located in EU
or not, that stores or processes EU citizens’ personal data must comply with
the GDPR. The GDPR, which came into effect on 25 May 2018, enables EU citizens
to exercise control over their personal data.
Article 4(1), defines personal data as follows –
“Personal data means any information relating to an
identified or identifiable natural person (data subject); an identifiable
natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in
particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification
number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific
to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social
identity of that natural person.”
Online advertising industry is one of the most affected
industries by the GDPR. Online advertisers use third-party cookies as the main
tool to track users’ online activities for serving them highly specific ads. Cookies
are small text files that gets stored in the users’ web browsers.
Third-party cookies serve as a trace for advertisers. Through
third-party cookies, advertisers are able to create a rich profile of users
that include the websites they visit, their interests, products they buy, and
more. Third-party cookies store enough user data to come under the GDPR scanner.
According to the CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet
Security and Trust 2019, in which more than 25,000 internet users participated from
twenty-five countries across the globe, - In 2019, 78% of survey respondents
said they were very concerned or somewhat concerned about their online privacy.
53% said they were much more concerned or somewhat more concerned than they
were a year ago. While 78% of all respondents in 2019 were concerned about
their online privacy, 90% or more were concerned in Egypt, Hong Kong, India,
Nigeria, and Mexico, with more than 85% concerned in South Africa, Indonesia,
and South Korea.
With rising privacy concerns among the consumers, coming into effect of
the GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and the gradual
phasing-out of third-party cookies in Chrome by Google, the digital marketers
have started looking into alternate ways delivering online ads to consumers
that are both effective and compliant with the personal data protection
regulations.
In the era of GDPR and other online privacy laws, contextualtargeting offers an effective way for advertisers to display online ads,
while being compliant with the privacy regulation. Contextual advertising
allows advertisers to display ads on a website by targeting its content. Ads
are displayed on the basis of keywords or topics. This method, therefore, displays
ads that are relevant to the content, and hence, increases the chances of users
clicking on the ads. For example, if a brand wants to sell smartphones, then it
can have its ads placed on the websites that have content about smartphones,
gadgets, technology, etc.
An advanced form of contextual advertising involves
semantic targeting, which makes use of machine learning algorithms to
understand the meaning of each page of content on a website, rather than just looking
for keywords placed on a web page.
As with text content, contextual targeting offers a
GDPR compliant advertising solution for video content. Conventional contextual video
advertising works by identifying keywords. This often results in placement
of irrelevant ads.
The innovative artificial intelligence and computer
vision powered in-video contextual advertising technology overcomes the
limitations of traditional contextual advertising. It offers an
effective, GDPR-compliant solution to advertisers for displaying contextually
relevant in-video ads to users. It works by detecting faces, objects, emotions,
logos, activities and scenes in video content. It then serves the ads that are
fully in line with what the user is currently watching, thus allowing for a
very high chance of user engagement.
The contextual, artificial intelligence advertising
does not collect, store or utilize users’ personal data for displaying ads,
thus offering a GDPR-compliant approach. It only considers what a user is
currently engaging with and serves him the contextually relevant ads.
The AI-powered contextual targeting is highly
effective for the advertisers, non-annoying for the consumers, and in
compliance with the GDPR.
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