What’s old is new again. Contextual advertising has come back on marketers’ radar as data privacy regulations (GDPR and CCPA) and browser crackdowns on cookies greatly limit how data and tracking can be used for targeting digital advertising.

A new study aims to demonstrate how far contextual advertising has evolved in the age of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) as an effective ad targeting method.

Methodology. The study was designed by GumGum, a contextual advertising company that uses computer vision and NLP to analyze the text, images and videos that appear on a web page (yes, it has skin in this game) and conducted by neuroanalytics company SPARK Neuro.