When all the cookie dust has settled, contextual targeting may be the only way to reach mass audiences. So let’s note that Precise TV, a “kid-safe contextual advertising platform for YouTube”, has extended its reach to connected TV through a deal with video content classification vendor IRIS.TV. Back in the day, all TV ad buys were fundamentally contextual, but that was when media buyers chose from, like, five channels.
Google has given up on its FLoC cookie-less targeting initiative, which faced insurmountable privacy objections. The replacement, which mercifully does not reference anything bird-related, is Topics API, which will offer three recent interests for each individual based on sites they have recently visited. The loss in targeting and tracking power is so huge that you wonder if Google is purposely showing what tighter privacy is costing the industry. Or maybe they’re just kneecapping competitors.
Email offers precise targeting without cookies but anti-spam laws make it hard to reach new customers. Portugal-based Emailbidding somehow gets around that problem with a service that lets advertisers bid on emails to external lists. They were just bought by Berlin-based Audience Serv, which also sells email prospecting campaigns but apparently without the fancy bidding mechanism.
Scope3 is expanding into brand safety and fraud detection turf of Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify. Amazon DSP is the first company to integrate Scope3’s Agentic Media Platform, which eliminates made-for-advertising, fraud, non-brand-safe, and climate-risk inventory by default. A separate Brand Standards product, built on top of the Agentic Media Platform, lets companies connect with expert AI agents to apply additional content standards.