All-new approach to privacy-centric, contextual advertising delivers timely and relevant consumer engagement when it matters.

Vericast today bolstered its targeting capabilities with the debut of its proprietary contextual advertising solution to help clients reach and influence the right people at the right time. Built in-house as a privacy-centric targeting solution, its continually evolving algorithm, keyword match capability and advanced categorization engine deliver highly relevant digital ads to consumers when they are actively seeking information and more likely to convert.

Vericast's contextual advertising solution features a sophisticated categorization engine that processes more than 5 million new web pages daily and aggregates metadata from more than 18 million mobile apps to deliver contextually relevant reach. Vericast's algorithm dynamically crawls and scores websites within hours of publication and optimizes campaigns real-time, ensuring that advertisements are performing and appearing next to fresh, relevant, and brand-safe content. It also categorizes web content into Vericast's proprietary and industry available taxonomies for nearly 2,000 categories that advertisers can target to reach intended audiences.

Recent figures show that digital ad spend reached more than $248 billion in the U.S. last year, up 12.5% from 2021. This growth coupled with fast-changing consumer privacy regulations, technological and industry shifts prompted the need for a superior, more accurate contextual advertising solution.

Vericast research verified the necessity – and the opportunity – to reinvent contextual advertising. A recent survey of 1,000 consumers in the U.S. found that 45% prefer being served advertising that relates to the content they are viewing, with 82% saying they will pay more attention to these ads specifically. However, many consumers are waylaid by irrelevant advertising: 83% often see ads on websites that are unrelated to the content being viewed, and 79% say the same for ads on streaming services. On privacy, 94% of consumers say it is important that marketers and advertisers respect their data privacy, while another 71% indicated they favor data privacy legislation.

"The digital advertising industry is changing rapidly. Regulatory, technological and industry shifts challenge traditional targeting methods to be privacy-centric," said Hans Fischmann, Vice President, Digital Product at Vericast. "With our contextual solution, we are helping clients convert unknowns to knowns without relying on cookies and strengthening our privacy-forward capabilities to further help brands engage with consumers with the right message at the right time."

Additional key features of Vericast's contextual advertising solution include:

• Natural Language Processing: Continued evolution pushes this solution beyond keywords to take linguistic context into account. This allows brands to differentiate between words with multiple meanings. For example, if a keyword is 'football', Vericast's contextual advertising solution can differentiate between American football and soccer based on context.
• Customized targeting: The customizable solution generates contexts that are relevant for the specific campaign and germane to program goals. This, combined with Vericast's advanced Consumer Graph targeting capabilities, allows brands to reach qualified audiences. While the contextual solution delivers relevant ads to preferred audiences at the right time, the Vericast Consumer Graph connects billions of online and offline signals daily from every zip code in America for a more complete view of the consumer. It also uncovers visitation patterns to see where people live and shop, allowing advertisers to find high-intent shoppers.
• Measurement and optimization: The system optimizes all campaigns real-time to perform against campaign objectives and targeting to provide optimal results. Additionally, campaign reporting demonstrates performance, audience insights and delivery by contextual segment.