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Marketers and adtech firms have latched onto metadata to improve ad targeting on the web and connected television, as data quality worsens with cookie decline.
Metadata is data about the environment of the ad, said Mike O’Sullivan, co-founder of the data firm Sincera. “It’s data that puts the transaction in context,” he said.
While metadata can refer to any signal in the bidstream, its recent applications often center around advanced contextual signals, like ads-to-content ratio and genre that can direct marketers toward more premium inventory.
The looming deadline of cookie deprecation has made looking for signals outside of audience data necessary. Advancements in artificial intelligence have made it possible for algorithms to ingest hundreds of these potential alternative signals and figure out which is best to power a campaign, on the web or elsewhere, O’Sullivan said.
”These signals have been historically underutilized because of an over-reliance on user IDs,” O’Sullivan said.
Metadata in action
Rain the Growth Agency analyzed its log files and found that time of day, zip code, and genre or channel were the primary drivers of conversions. Using these signals, with a custom algorithm from Chalice Custom Algorithms, the agency ran a CTV campaign for a technology client looking to drive audiences to create accounts.
The campaign achieved customer acquisition costs 47% lower than the brand’s historical average and reduced the brand’s average CPMs by 16%.
About half Rain the Growth Agency’s CTV clients are using metadata to target, and most see positive results. As a result, the agency is expanding tests to the rest of its CTV clients this year.
The pendulum swings away
Chalice has roughly five clients that have found metadata makes their targeting algorithms much more predictive of outcomes like brand lift, lifetime value and sales, said Chalice co-founder Ali Manning. The company began using metadata in the first quarter of last year.
Metadata is emerging as a new signal to find audiences as cookies expire on the web this year. It helps buyers find quality media programmatically, a growing priority for those experiencing traditional adtech methods result in too much long-tail, poor quality inventory. Exemplifying this pendulum swing away from pure audience targeting, The Trade Desk’s forthcoming SP500+ solution lets buyers target across a group of premium publishers.
