The forthcoming disappearance of third-party cookies has led to many new ideas for innovative advertising targeting, one of which is contextual analysis. This approach consists in the automatic analysis of website content so as to display advertising messages to Internet users in accordance with the campaign’s targeting. Thanks to this technology, companies are no longer bound by personal data to successfully carry out their digital campaigns.
Qwarry asked a neutral third party, the CESP, a French non-profit industry body for the advertising and media industry players, to audit its solution. The audit focused on the Internet page classification engine that DSPs can address into meaningful categories for ad targeting. This search engine is based on NLP (Natural Language Processing), i.e., algorithms used in the field of Data Science for text analysis. The CESP found Qwarry’s contextual targeting solution to be scientifically satisfactory and emphasised the transparency it provides to its clients. In addition to the audit of the statistical models, the CESP also looked at the creation of a training database. Since the algorithms used by Qwarry are training methods, they rely on a training database made of known advertising category texts. The CESP recommended that this database should be thoroughly constructed and updated so as to secure long-term targeting performance.
“In a constantly changing world, both legally and in terms of future technological developments, contextual targeting is a key challenge for digital advertising. Through this first pure player audit, the CESP is supporting the industry in the understanding of these new players. Thus, the CESP independently assessed Qwarry’s approach by examining its entire business process and issued a report whose findings were communicated to the Collège Data”, states Olivier Hays, Head of Data Science at CESP.
“We are proud to be the first player to have a semantic targeting solution audited. Transparency is a core value of Qwarry and is at the heart of our customer relationship. Our unique proprietary technology enables advertisers and agencies to improve performance in today’s challenging advertising industry. The CESP audit proves the power of our technology, which keeps evolving to ensure our clients’ success,” adds Julie Walther, co-founder and COO of Qwarry.
Methodology:
The audit took place between September 2021 and January 2022 and consisted in the methodology review supplemented by access to Qwarry’s program code allowing for the independent reproduction of the calculations. Therefore, the CESP carried out a scientific audit of the contextual and semantic targeting solutions.
