At Advertising Week, GumGum, a leading contextual adtech company, is calling on the industry to move away from legacy identity-based advertising.
“Old-school, identity-based targeting is all data and no insight,” said Phil Schraeder, CEO of GumGum, in a press release announcing the launch of the company’s GumGum Platform. The platform is described as an all-in-one contextual offering, combining contextual targeting, attention measurement, and dynamic creative.
Alongside its new GumGum Platform, the company also launched the Mindset Graph, a data tool to help advertisers analyze the relationship between context, attention, and creative. In real-time, GumGum says it identifies the best contexts, topics, and keywords for ads, syncing them for the best content experience.
And, if that wasn’t enough, GumGum also unveiled a new sports marketing solution during Advertising Week. It brings together the new GumGum Platform with Relo Metrics, a GumGum subsidiary that measures sports sponsorships. The goal is to link contextual ad delivery with sponsorship ROI measurement. The GumGum Platform serves context ads and optimizes for attention, while Relo tracks sponsorship effectiveness.
Why This Matters:
Schraeder emphasizes, “We’re proving you can build genuine connections without invading people’s digital lives. It’s advertising technology that respects your privacy and actually works.”
GumGum’s contextual offering is particularly timely. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report describing digital advertising as “mass commercial surveillance.” The report endorsed contextual advertising as an alternative, saying, “Unlike contextual, behavioral advertising incentivizes continuous and constant collection of user data.”
This isn’t the first time the FTC has supported contextual. In 2021, FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, in a speech, said, “Targeting can be done contextually, triggered by the content to which an ad is attached, or even through broad and general categories. These types of targeting do not raise the same concerns that surveillance advertising does.”
With these launches, GumGum is positioning itself to win as there is growing scrutiny of identity-based advertising.
Experts React:
This recent tweet from Michael Bishop, CTO and co-founder of OpenAds.ai, comes to mind:
Our Take:
GumGum’s launches highlight the increasing pressure on identity-based ad-targeting. Stricter privacy regulations, growing consumer awareness of data collection, and the phase-out of cookies are pushing advertisers and adtech firms to rethink their targeting from top to bottom.
Contextual offers a real alternative, addressing many identity concerns. Regulators favor it since it doesn’t depend on collecting personal data, and consumers find it less intrusive while still relevant (hopefully). Now, with advances in ad technology, contextual can scale more through GumGum and other providers.
