GumGum Partners with Xandr on Transparent Ad Solution

With growing demand for cookieless targeting solutions, the contextual-first global digital advertising platform ​​GumGum announced a partnership with Xandr on an accredited cookieless solution for advertisers. Xandr now becomes the first major DSP to offer GumGum’s contextual intelligence technology, Verity, to allow brands to ensure their ads are placed in contextually relevant environments.

“GumGum has been working with Xandr since 2012, when our SSP was connected to Xandr’s Invest DSP. Our expanded partnership further enhances both GumGum and Xandr offerings by allowing advertisers and buyers to target audiences with a pre-bid, cookieless solution that is transparent, effective, and drives results,” says William Merchan, head of Verity at GumGum.

GumGum was founded in 2008 by Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir, who sought to create the next generation of contextual intelligence platforms with the ability to optimize advertising campaigns to drive action and outcomes.

Through the new integration, advertisers using Xandr’s Invest DSP can apply GumGum’s contextual intelligence platform for brand safety, contextual segments, keywords, and sentiment to place ads alongside relevant content. Merchan says the result is ads that not only drive attention but also lead to better brand recall. Through Xandr Curate, advertisers will also be able to activate Verity on Monetize SSP supply on almost any DSP.

“Our platform Verity is the only contextual intelligence solution that combines natural language processing and computer vision to read web pages in their entirety — meaning text, video, images, and audio — with human-like nuance,” Merchan says. “Verity is also the first and only contextual solution to have achieved the Media Ratings Council content-level accreditation for contextual analysis, brand safety, and suitability.”

The partnership expands GumGum’s reach and scale significantly. The company serves 19 markets worldwide, including the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Mexico, along with regions of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. However, that reach could balloon, with GumGum expected to process more than 100 million pages per day and over 9 billion requests per day from Xandr alone.

“GumGum’s scale and reach has increased significantly through this partnership with Xandr … We work with over 150 agency partners and over 700 brand partners, and now, they’re all able to use Verity in the Xandr DSP to work across other supply they are accessing,” Merchan says. “In addition, Playground xyz, a GumGum company acquired last year, is integrated with Xandr, which gives advertisers the ability to not only use GumGum’s contextual technology, but also Playground xyz’s attention technology across their campaigns.”

The Privacy-First Approach to Ad Targeting

Merchan says GumGum has been a longtime champion of the privacy-first approach to ad targeting. As the industry continues to shift and lean into solutions that don’t require personal data and tracking of third-party cookies, and as behavioral targeting faces greater scrutiny, he anticipates seeing contextual advertising become increasingly pertinent for buyers.

GumGum has created a blueprint for the future of the industry, called the Mindset Matrix, that lays out how advertisers should leverage contextual understanding and consumer attention measurement to optimize campaigns in real-time. Merchan says the company is looking toward the future of digital advertising with the belief that tapping into a consumer’s active frame of mind, rather than relying on past behaviors, is how brands will succeed.

“We don’t need personal data to serve consumers relevant ads and never have, and consumers are rightly looking to protect their data. Contextual solutions rely on artificial intelligence to meet consumers in the moment they’re in to place relevant ads rather than serving ads based on past behavior,” Merchan says. “If you’re served an ad for a tent three weeks after researching camping equipment, is that effective? No. That’s why placing ads in contextually relevant environments is important: to allow advertisers and publishers to effectively reach their audiences and align the message with their mindset in the present moment, while also respecting user privacy.”

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.