Can a startup named Quintesse help bring the industry together?
As a brand consultant, I often advise clients to consider the valence of their stories. If it has a negative valence — i.e., “the 3rd-party cookie market is crumbling” — you can get a lot of people worried. But if it has a positive valence, you can mobilize even more people to come together and take action.
CEO Doug Stevenson
I thought about this phenomenon last week when meeting with the founders of Quintesse, a new contextual intelligence platform recently launched by parent company Vibrant Media (disclosure: I consulted for Vibrant in the way back.) The way Quintesse sees it, brands and publishers that are worried about the eventual demise of the third-party cookie market — Google Chrome recently wrote the death sentence when it announced it would phase out cookies, which trade on personal data, within two years — will soon be compelled to embrace technology designed to address their biggest challenges in the pro-privacy world. For brands, it’s all about buying audiences at a time when inventory seems to be shrinking. For publishers, it’s all about increasing that inventory. If Quintesse is right, the opportunity for both could foretell an adtech renaissance.
Consent
Adtech’s potential fortunes are Quintesse’s as well. There are at least three reasons why Quintesse is so confident.
First, there’s the inevitable transformation of adtech to a paradigm that, for lack of a better word, is consensual. Google’s announcement — which came well after Firefox and Safari moved away from third-party cookies — cannot be viewed as altruistic. Privacy regulations like the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA are forcing the collective hand of the adtech industry. By applying advanced contextual technology — which identifies brand-appropriate content that’s relevant to readers — Quintesse obviates the consent issue. And it helps that the team has years of experience working the many intricacies of GDPR for large clients at its parent company. According to Scottish-born CEO Doug Stevenson, Quintesse has been able to leverage that global experience to sign up large companies in pharma and fintech for audits of their digital campaigns. One thing the audits are attempting to root out: false positives that are often produced by “blunt keyword-matching technologies,” says Stevenson.
Context
It’s something that Stevenson makes a point of emphasizing. Contextual tech has come a long way over the past decade, a time when the adtech pendulum perhaps began to swing too far toward 3rd-party data solutions. The Quintesse tech team, under the leadership of CTO Richard Brindley, spent a good part of that time integrating AI technologies — including natural language processing and curated
CTO Richard Brindley
(i.e., human supervised) machine learning — to make contextual faster, more accurate, and more scalable. Brindley views these advances as the tablestakes required to compete in an industry poised for transformation. But that’s not to say that the pendulum will swing entirely toward contextual. Customer data still matters, as long as one has permission to use it. Brands are beginning to see a world where first-party data can be put to use alongside contextual technology, creating “context segments to pass into bidstream,” says Stevenson. The new hybrid has a name: “addressable contextual.”
Content
But from my perspective — the POV of a brand consultant who works with brands to rethink their content strategy — what makes the new contextual so interesting is its commitment to understanding the special value of content in the marketing ecosystem.
For years, I have been puzzled with how two parts of that ecosystem — content marketing and adtech — have moved so far apart; not just in terms of values, but in terms of approach, as well. With content marketing, the locus of control depends on what people care about on the Web — i.e., what they read, what they hear, what they view. If you can understand that, with greater speed, accuracy, and scale, you could find a path toward reconciling disparate parts of your marketing program. For example, you might be able to identify the right signals of intent along the “customer journey” that content marketers have long spoken about, from awareness, research, to purchase. In the end, Quintesse has a value proposition for brands, publishers, DSPs, SSPs, and other adtech incumbents. But it also has a story for strategic marketing teams — where the person in charge is the CMO — and, yes, consumers.
Is the industry ready for a renaissance-like realignment? It might be too early to tell. At a recent IAB conference, adtech entrepreneur Ari Paparo — in his always informative and sometimes entertaining Twitter feed — observed that the conference felt “like an AA meeting where we tearfully admit our addiction to third party cookies and promise to clean up.” Paparo shared the tweet with the hashtag #12cookiesteps. But the first step toward recovery is accepting that you, like the Cookie Monster, have a problem. I suspect that the industry is already sobering up to the opportunities.
