GumGum introduces a personal data-free approach to digital advertising

GumGum, a contextual-first digital advertising platform, has launched The Mindset Matrix, a framework for delivering targeted ad campaigns, across current and future channels, without the use of cookies or personal data. “The truth is we don’t need to know who you are in order to deliver relevant and effective advertising,” said GumGum CEO Phil Schraeder in a release.

The Mindset Matrix takes steps beyond contextual advertising. It has three components:

• True contextual understanding, refined approach to context that uses not just text, but image, video and audio, to understand an entire digital environment and support the placement of ads relevant to its audience.
• Smart Ad Creatives that relate ads to the surrounding content, enhancing rather than detracting from the audience’s experience.
• Attention Measurement and Optimization, evaluating the actual attention an ad drives and therefore how successfully the ad fits the context.

Why we care. GumGum is promoting its matrix as “the marketing playbook of the future” — and indeed, if we see stringent government clampdown on use of customer data alongside steps by vendors to deprecate third-party cookies and mobile tracking — the only game left in town may be contextual advertising. Happily, it’s more sophisticated these days than advertising soap on daytime TV shows.

It will need to be.

About The Author

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.