The Washington Post is Preparing for Post-Cookie Ad Targeting:
The Washington Post has developed a first-party data ad targeting tool called Zeus Insights that offers detailed contextual targeting capabilities along with user-intent predictions for marketers. The goal: to give marketers a sophisticated ad-targeting tool that isn’t reliant on third-party cookies but still drives results despite stricter data-privacy stipulations laid down by regulators.
The Zeus platform monitors contextual data such as what article a person is reading or watching, what position they have scrolled to on a page, what URL they have used to arrive there and what they’re clicking on. The publisher will then match that data to its existing audience data pools, which it has accumulated over the last four years, to create assumptions on what that news user’s consumption intent will be. The technology uses machine learning to decipher the patterns.
However, The Post’s strategic goal isn’t just to provide ad-targeting options for advertising clients that want to wean themselves off reliance on third-party cookies; it’s also to widen other publishers’ ability to compete with the big tech platforms.
The Post plans to license the Zeus platform to publishers both domestically and internationally, by integrating it with its Arc technology platform, which it has licensed to publishers since 2016 and reaches a combined 750 million unique users globally, according to the publisher. The theory is that in doing so, publishers can compete more effectively with the scale and data-targeting opportunities provided by Facebook and Google.
[...] “In a world where third-party cookies are being killed and cookie pools are decreasing, we expect tools like this to increase in importance,” said Ryan Storrar, svp and head of media activation, EMEA for Essence. “Being able to action cookieless user data is a helpful step in the right direction to embrace privacy in precision marketing.”
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday July 19 2019, @03:49AM (8 children)
And I'm the only one left on this planet who find this creepy. I guess I should just go stare at some blue LEDs until my head explodes.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @04:16AM
pssst... The red ones are better.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Friday July 19 2019, @04:20AM
I was freaked out by "action cookieless".
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday July 19 2019, @04:43AM (2 children)
There are four lights.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @04:55AM (1 child)
There are four lights.
One of them is blinking, slowly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @02:01PM
Very creepy! How did you know what my 2009 Toyota Matrix is doing?
> There are four lights.
> One of them is blinking, slowly.
This is exactly the symptom. Check engine light, ABS, Stability Control and one other I've forgotten. Three are steady on, one blinks (all are yellow warnings).
If I drive it every day (hypothesis - keep the battery well charged), the lights stay off. If I let the car sit for a few days, the lights will come on the next time I drive the car, even though there is plenty of battery to run the starter motor. Then driving every day for a few days the lights will turn off.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @05:08AM (1 child)
Small secret - that monitoring can only happen if you allow them to run arbitrary program code on your machine.
Block their javascript, and there is no monitoring possible.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday July 19 2019, @02:48PM
Shhhhhhhh! We wouldn't want people to know that!
uMatrix is great.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @07:03AM
But until we create a mirror content stream that aggregates only javascript hostile websites, this situation isn't going to get any better for us.
Even then we might be missing out on some subset of popular culture or key news unavailable anywhere else.
Honestly though, any garbage behind a javascript wall hasn't been worth it for me so far.