IRIS

Contextual Video Advertising Landscape Breakdown

This VideoWeek article surveys the contextual video advertising landscape, detailing how contextual data can fill gaps left by the loss of third‑party cookies. It categorizes approaches into metadata analysis, content recognition (audio transcription and computer vision), behavioural data, real‑world context, and data marketplaces. Metadata analysis uses page text, URLs, and tags to infer context, often enhanced by AI weighting. Content recognition analyzes video content itself to extract contextual categories. The piece lists notable players by category: metadata analysis (Zefr, Vibrant, Pixability, Channel Factory, Precise TV, video intelligence, Peer39, OpenSlate); content recognition (Silverpush, GumGum, 7th Minute, TappX, Grapeshot); behavioural data (Illuma, Seedtag, Pixability, Precise TV); real‑world context (Beemray, Groundtruth); data marketplaces (IRIS.TV, Peer39). It concludes that the market is sophisticated and fragmented, with ongoing evolution as identity data narrows.

MediaMath Launches SOURCE for Publisher Transparency

MediaMath today unveiled SOURCE, an industry initiative aimed at bringing full transparency to the digital media supply chain by the end of 2020. Presented as a collaborative effort, SOURCE has signed on partners across the ecosystem, including Rubicon Project, Business Insider, NewsCorp, Telaria, White Ops, Havas, IRIS.TV, and Crackle Plus. The program seeks to rework the economics of digital advertising to incentivize data sharing, delivering a supply chain that is 100% accountable and addressable with modernized terms of trade and new technical standards. SOURCE will enable a single view of a brand’s customers across desktop, mobile, and TV via a persistent, portable user-level ID, with AI drawing out insights from the data. The initiative concentrates on Connected TV and OTT, leveraging Telaria’s transparency program and involving Vizio and Inscape. MediaMath leaders CEO Joe Zawadski and Global Head of Ecosystem Jeremy Steinberg frame the effort as a meaningful step toward greater transparency, data sharing, and price clarity.

Personalisation Shouldn’t Be the Preserve of Tech Giants

IRIS.TV co-founder and chief operating officer Richie Hyden argues that personalisation in digital advertising should not be the exclusive domain of tech giants. In a VideoWeek interview filmed at DMEXCO 2018 in Cologne, Hyden notes that traditional media companies have historically been content-first, while Google, Facebook and Amazon have excelled at understanding consumer preferences. He suggests this gap drives a shift in ad spend toward platforms with stronger audience insight. Hyden points to IRIS.TV’s collaboration with IBM Watson as a concrete example of bringing AI-driven personalisation to publishers. The discussion underscores the need for traditional media to invest in data-driven audience understanding and to democratise access to AI-powered personalisation beyond a few dominant players.