In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography by not defining it: “I know it when I see it.”
I’d argue that, at least from the consumer’s perspective, the opposite statement applies to contextual advertising. Because, online at least, the definition can be … rather fungible.
As the Federal Trade Commission noted in its 2009 report on self-regulatory principles for online behavioral advertising, “rapidly changing technologies and other factors have made the line between personally identifiable and non-personally identifiable information increasingly unclear.”
And that was way back in 2009, when ad tech was still a baby.
Most people consider contextual targeting to be the most privacy-friendly personalization option available because the idea is to target ads based on the environment in which an ad appears rather than based on the person. And it’s cookieless, etcetera, etcetera.
But as the technology evolves, the notion of what falls under the umbrella of contextual targeting is expanding to the point that someone being served a so-called “contextual” ad might reasonably assume that they were being targeted using behavioral signals.
Along for the ride
For instance, is location-based targeting considered contextual?
If you squint your eyes hard enough, sure.
Last year, Uber introduced an ad offering called “journey ads” that lets brands target riders based on their destination.
A fast food chain that knows you’re heading to the mall can serve a coupon to entice you into the food court. A brand that wants to reach travelers can hit them up on their way to the airport. Coca-Cola or the Raisinets people (man, I love Raisinets) would no doubt want to advertise to someone who’s Ubering over to a movie theater.
“We’re not doing any individual user-based targeting,” Mark Grether, the GM of Uber’s ads business, told AdExchanger at the time. “I think ‘contextual’ is a better way of thinking about it.”
To be fair, you don’t need to know anything else about a person other than where they’re going to make apt inferences about what products and services they might be interested in.
But using someone’s intended location as a targeting signal would probably fall outside the scope of what an average consumer would consider to be contextual.
Muddy waters
Which leads directly to the question: Is there a standard definition of what constitutes contextual?
The answer is … nope.
The ad tech industry favors whatever definition is expedient and lucrative, and most privacy laws don’t define it at all.
For example, although the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act permits contextual advertising, there is no definition of exactly what it is anywhere in the text of the law itself.
Kinda feels like we’re in “I know it when I see it” territory.
In the absence of a legal definition, most regulators will consider an industry’s own commonly used definitions.
In that 2009 report, the FTC described contextual targeting as “advertising based on a consumer’s current visit to a single web page or a single search query that involves no retention of data about the consumer’s online activities beyond that necessary for the immediate delivery of an ad or search result.”
But while that might be the way that the online ad industry defined contextual 14 years ago, it’s quaint by today’s standards.
And as contextual technology becomes more and more sophisticated, the border between audience-based and contextual targeting will only get muddier.
I’ll leave you with an open-ended question that came up during a recent chat I had with Laura Edelson, an incoming assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and former CTO of the DOJ’s antitrust division.
“It can be a blurry line between when context seems to cross into what you might think of as behavioral advertising,” Edelson said. As those lines get blurrier, “when does that become a distinction without a difference?”
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think, both about this newsletter and whether this is a contextual placement. 😹 🐶 Drop me a line at [email protected].
