Centro this week plans to release what it calls a privacy-friendly, cookieless targeting engine that automatically recommends contextual targeting categories based on a marketer’s best-performing audiences.

The Basis platform is the first demand side platform (DSP), per the company, to offer contextual category recommendation targeting. Basis is a software that consolidates digital operations across programmatic, direct, CTV, search, and social campaigns.

Why did it take the industry so long to make the transition, and why did it take privacy regulations to put it over the edge? “Cookies are easy,” said Tyler Kelly, president at Centro. “It is how a significant part of the Internet ad ecosystem was built, and ad tech giants want to hold onto it.”

He called cookies a “blunt instrument” that made the lives of digital professionals easier in terms of finding customers and measuring performance. Sometimes they found them repeatedly.

“But if consumers are becoming more vocal that this is not how they want to be reached by advertising, it behooves the industry to find alternative methods,” he said. “Sophisticated context-based targeting could help our industry get back to the pillars that advertising was built on — the right ad, in the right place, at the right time. It allows us to continue the performance tracking that the industry thrives on, but in a way that is consumer-friendly.”

As consumers demand more privacy in digital channels, the latest release is one way to disentangle campaigns from the use of third-party cookies while reaching similar audiences.

Peer39, a provider of pre-bid keyword, contextual, and brand safety technology, powers the feature put together by the two companies.

Advertisers use the feature to analyze the overall performance metrics of a brand or a campaign such as impressions, conversions, completion rates, general key performance indicators (KPIs), and more.

Based on that first-party advertiser intelligence, Peer39 and Basis predict the contextual targeting categories should perform the best, whether or not the original campaign utilized contextual targeting. This analysis is applicable across all types of inventory,

Marketers can draw value from first-party audience data by uncovering customer content consumption patterns and converting them into contextual signals. Optimize campaign budgets to contextual segments that aren’t obvious or analyze it for future marketing efforts. And target wider demographics that have similar content consumption habits of audiences being targeted.

Mario Diez, CEO at Peer39, called the collaboration with Centro “a landmark initiative” that provided marketers the visibility, measurement, insights and optimization required to bolster their media performance.

Peer39 has been quiet, but busy this past year. The company released a contextual data marketplace that aggregates data from uncharacteristic sources to apply against programmatic buys.

The marketplace includes cookie-free data sets from several suppliers like NewsGuard, and Hotspex Media. It makes the data available through existing relationships with demand-side platforms.

Hotspex Media has an offering, for example, that Home Depot Canada uses. It develops emotional data segments based on context, such as “uplifting,” which is a data set tied to content classified as encouraging and optimistic.