Publishers Are Caught in the Crossfire as Ad Tech Builds Contextual Targeting Offerings

Publishers are finding themselves caught in the line of fire as ad-tech companies, in their search for alternatives to third-party cookies, build out their contextual targeting offerings. The decline of third-party cookies means it will be harder for marketers to identify and target specific audiences. As the industry tries to resolve its identity crisis, contextual advertising becomes an attractive alternative. Contextual offerings rely on heaps of data that buy-side companies can gather by scattering web crawlers across the internet to scan domain names and the content on websites. All of this data is packaged and sold to marketers looking to buy ads against specific content, like food or travel, for example. However, according to multiple publishers who’ve spoken to Adweek, these web crawlers can significantly slow down a publisher’s website; cause a spike in invalid traffic, which can lead advertisers to ask for makegoods or block sites entirely; and take publishers’ valuable data, essentially undermining their own sales efforts. More data leakage Scott Messer, svp of media at online publisher Leaf Group, said content owners should be alarmed that web crawlers from third-party contextual vendors are “strip mining” one of their most valuable assets: first-party data. “There is the technical downside of bogging down publishers’ servers and spiking their [invalid traffic] rates, but also the much graver concern that these companies continue to disintermediate publishers from their audiences while undermining a publisher's ability to properly build relationships with advertisers,” Messer said. Publishers already risk losing control of their audience data as data leakage is commonplace in open auctions. Despite the shift away from buying on audiences, publishers still face the prospect of competing with third parties who are collecting and selling their information. “If you believe contextual content is your strength in the cookie shuffle, then be very wary of the middlemen coming to steal it right away from you,” Messer said. Web crawlers are common across the open web. Good crawling can help boost a site’s SEO and land it higher on a search engine. Bad crawling includes fraudsters lifting and plagiarizing content. Web crawlers that gather contextual advertising data seem to fit somewhere in the middle: They’re meant to help publishers increase yield and boost CPMs, but they also hurt the site’s user experience and undermine a publisher’s data offering. Companies that offer contextual targeting, like Criteo, Integral Ad Science and Oracle’s Moat, do help fill a publisher’s inventory. Marketers can buy contextual ads directly from publishers, or they can work with a vendor to buy ads at scale. IAS, known as a brand safety vendor, bought ADmantX in late 2019 as part of a push into contextual advertising. Criteo, known widely as a cookie-reliant retargeting firm, has been building out a contextual offering over the last couple months. Todd Parsons, chief product officer at Criteo, said more clients are asking for contextual offerings given the decline of third-party cookies. To meet that ask, Criteo is building an offering to match ecommerce data with URLs to correlate ad performance to a specific kind of content or web page. “What we're really up to now is building a strong MVP, something that we can take out to hundreds of clients and run it … in the end of the first quarter. So that's our target. We're still very much in build,” Parsons said. Moat declined to comment. IAS declined to comment on the record. Is the data accurate? Publishers have long been wary of intermediaries, since they only see 51% of every ad dollar spent on programmatic advertising. Plus, they’ve criticized brand safety vendors, which now offer contextual targeting, as blunt force instruments. Scott Cunningham, a digital media consultant, said the most accurate way to analyze contextual data is to get as close to the source as possible, meaning publishers—either on their own or with the help of a third party—are best suited for the job. Cunningham, who founded the IAB Tech Lab, said marketers should question the accuracy of contextual data they receive from third parties. “Our biggest concern is brands are going to make some brand suitability decisions in their buying based on what … may not be an entirely accurate footprint of the content that they're actually trying to avoid or target,” Cunningham said. Parsons said advertisers are looking for audiences that perform, and that means getting publishers involved. “This is one of those things that if we get it right, [publishers] are going to get a lot more fill, and they're going to get it at a higher CPM, and we'll be able to prove it." Lack of communication While many intermediaries do have commercial relationships with publishers, none is required in order to crawl a website. A vendor sends out its crawler, a publisher notices a spike in invalid traffic, and then someone on the ad operations team spends time connecting the dots. Messer said vendors should ask for permission to crawl publishers' sites, and have some kind off value proposition when making the ask. “At a minimum it will be less disruptive, and at best they will find a higher quality of data and most likely a great partner as well,” Messer said. One publisher, who saw bot traffic from contextual targeting companies roughly double traffic from Google Search's web crawler over a three-week span in December, said some level of crawling is expected given the shift toward contextual targeting, but "I just don't expect them to be completely pounding our servers." "In the long run, [this] will end up making publishers money, but where the bulk of the money is going to be made is [vendors] selling this off to their clients," said the source. "Everyone knows by the time we get to publishers ... all the data costs are so far removed, we don't really get much of it." On its website, Criteo says its crawler analyzes public web content to build out its contextual ad offering, which aims to help publishers monetize their content and help advertisers find relevant web pages. “Anyone who wants to engage us in an open dialogue about how not to slow their user experience while we're trying to bring more value to them, we want to talk to them,” Parsons said.