I haven’t posted here in a while. I’m still buzzing a bit from our innovation competition win at the POSSIBLE conference to be honest. I thought it was high time to give you an update on one of the exciting projects that we’ve recently released:

Contextual Signals 1.0

You can look at it as a new, cookieless data stream for the Roqad identity graph.

For each user, we select the top 10 visited IAB Categories (from the user’s mobile applications and web URLs). As you can see in the diagram above, the first version of Contextual Signals is IAB Categories. It joins our other data streams such as MAIDs, Extended IDs, and CTV IDs. The result: an even richer understanding of the ultimate identity resolution question: who is this person? And now we know something about their interests.

The IAB Categories come from the IAB Content Taxonomy Version 1.0.

The IAB Content Taxonomy provides a common language that can be used when describing content or the aboutness of a webpage, application, or video. 

There are 390 IAB Categories in version 1.0

Category titles that might indicate something about a user’s race, religion, health status, and sexual orientation are excluded from the Graph. 

We’re pretty excited about it obviously, and we’re already pilot testing it with a major publisher in Europe. See below for an example of the categories we might see for a user that is searching for a new car.

We’re working on some other innovative projects, and I’ll tell you about them shortly. Stay tuned!