Meredith is rolling out new ad units with targeting based on a mix of content viewed on Meredith sites and location and time data.

Some examples:

Meredith said the targeting relies on mixing its own first-party data with retailer product information, then matching the right ad with Meredith site content that is most likely to drive a sale or action using the same predictive technology used to recommend content to visitors. If the reader winds up buying something from a retailer that Meredith has an affiliate relationship with, the publisher gets a commission from the sale too.

This past spring, Meredith began testing a prototype of these units on Allrecipes, where it used the tool to sell wines made by the vintner Ste. Michelle Estates. Those ads boasted a clickthrough rate of 5%, De Rubertis said, who declined to share specifics about how much revenue the ads made.

“We’re taking a bunch of classical signals that you’d use with dynamic creative, and doing it with a lot of AI rules,” said Corbin de Rubertis, Meredith’s head of innovation. “It’s about, ‘Can we put something in front of you that is of the maximum level of utility so you’re able to take the next step on your journey?’”



Two years ago, Meredith began overhauling the front-and back-ends of its sites, building master user IDs that would allow the company to understand what its audience was reading across its portfolio. That work is still in progress, so these new ad units are only being shown on sites visited by slightly more than half of Meredith’s audience, including Real Simple and People. The rest of the portfolio will be migrated over to the new system by the end of the first half of 2020, said Meredith president and chief digital officer Catherine Levene.

Meredith is gathering its first party and location data from several sources, including consumer data from its 43 million magazine subscribers and millions of Allrecipes readers who consented to share their location data. Eighty percent of the site’s readers consented to share a form of location data so they could see personalized offers from nearby grocers, de Rubertis said; Allrecipes averaged 44 million unique visitors from November 2018 to November 2019, according to Comscore.

Larger publishers are finding ways to better use their first-party user data as typical targeting tools based on cookies fall afoul of new privacy strictures by both browsers and regulators. Vox Media last week announced the launch of Forte, an ad targeting and optimization product built with additional sources of first party data, such as affiliate commerce sales data from its newly acquired New York Media property, The Strategist.

The California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into force last week, is a nice hook, too.

“CCPA is a great marketing tool to make it relevant again,” said Adam Solomon, the CMO of Lotame. “Every [request for proposal] that comes from a marketer has, ‘Here are the demographics, lifestyle attributes, the brands they enjoy, etc.,’” Solomon said. “But no one ever says, ‘I only want people who read this content.’”