If you are a smaller publisher, unless you get particularly active in courting advertisers (i.e. spend time going into sales), the niche advertisers will never even look at your content. The 20-something digital ad manager has no motivation to risk his job doing speculative ad spend. As a result your ads are less relevant and your inventory’s CPM drops as a result.
If you are a large property, then tracking affects you less (in fact tracking might be worse for you). Large publishers already have sales and marketing teams and ad managers will just choose you because you are “safe”. If brands are moving to a world where tracking data is less and less reliable, then by default they will move to spending more money on a smaller amount of “safe” inventory
With tracking, you spend all on an exchange that has a ton of supply. ELLE competes with JennyBlogger. You potentially hit a ton of women across different properties. You may be advertising to women on male dominated outlets (the “promise” of digital tracking)
With the direct route, an ad manager may spend that 1M on specific properties, maybe between ELLE, Vogue and InStyle. This is a bit of a simplification as most firms have separate direct and programmatic spend, but the amount of money allocated to each depends on the perceived return of each inventory type.
Correct.
On the other hand, the topic of the game is just one of the contexts. A trivial example:
At least we can infer that the player likes to play games, so advertising for mobile games, discount gaming consoles etc might be a better match.
If we are going to go down the road of doing increasingly detailed ad customization as publishers, we will have come full circle to reinventing targeted ads by another name.
Plays x game on y website at z time of the days however should tell you something though.
But based on the site, game and other indicators it might be a good place to place an ad for:
- stupid mobile games (assuming the audience is just bored)
- discount consoles/games (assuming audience is playing it because they don't have access to a console)
- toys (assuming audience is kids)
- etc
Its the unsolicited tracking/stalking of individuals across communication networks GDPR forbids.