Better ads? AI-powered targeting for major publishers
News about artificial intelligence, or large language models, keep on coming in a steady flow. This and that company adds AI to its assets, relies on LLM for that sort of task, and/or launches an AI-enabled product or service. Every day you hear something on this subject. But, if you don’t need, say, a picture based on your written description, or a summary of a text written in a foreign language, this buzz is more or less background noise for you. You don’t really feel the impact of AI on your life. The arrangement mentioned in the title of this post is a good example of how these developments affect virtually everyone on the level of daily grind.
Dotdash Meredith, which claims to be the largest digital and print publisher in the US, plans to follow the Financial Times, Axel Springer (publisher of Business Insider), and The Associated Press in signing a deal with OpenAI to use its LLM products as part of their ad-targeting systems. In the case of Dotdash Meredith, the latest entrant, it is D/Cipher.
Dotdash Meredith is behind some major media outlets: People, Investopedia, Better Homes & Gardens, Food & Wine, InStyle. Its audience counts millions a day, and when you consider other potential users of OpenAI’s solutions for ad-targeting systems, we may well be talking about dozens of millions.
In each case, the stated goal of the collaboration is to enhance the said system’s targeting capabilities and make it more effective. AI is expected to make ad serving a more sophisticated process and improve the result thereof.
What’s really going on?
As you probably know, Google plans to disregard third-party cookies in its Chrome browser, which owns about 60% of the market. Essentially, this spells doom for cookie-driven ad systems, so publishers, which rely on them for revenue, look for alternatives. This means that D/Cipher and similar solutions powering ad-serving machines of other media companies will use AI in a similar way as cookies, i.e., to sort out the user's interests and show respective banners. So, if you hoped for fewer ads, that’s unlikely, but a better ad experience may actually become a real thing, given the LLMs’ ability to train and, let’s use this word, evolve.
In the meantime, here’s the link to the internet tools section of Informer software catalog:
There are all sorts of programs making life on the web easier and more convenient there. Don’t forget your copy of Informer, the free and unobtrusive software updater:
