"Sugarless": The advertising revolution for the post-cookie era

BurdaForward radically rethinks the digital advertising world. Instead of looking for covert ways to use cookies in the future, a team of developers, marketers and editors has developed an in-house machine learning based data technology. The context- and content-based system functions without requiring consent, complies with data protection regulations and is user-friendly. "Sugarless" instead of cookies - for healthy goodvertising.

The digital publishing business is becoming increasingly difficult due to ad and cookie blocking, legal measures such as the DSGVO and the e-privacy directive. If 3rd-party tracking is no longer necessary, the personalized playout of advertising content is no longer possible. Users can agree to the cookies or register via login. However, the proportion of advertising that can be played out using personal data will decline massively.

So anyone who feeds on cookies alone is living unhealthily. It is time for a long-term change in diet. "Sugarless" helps without dietary stress: away from personalized user data and towards context- and content-based solutions.

The market has been asleep for too long. We need a data revolution. The old, familiar world of cookies is going under. With our new, machine learning technology, we are taking contextual targeting to a new level and rethinking the core of Germany's advertising world.“

Smart mix boosts advertising performance - our semantic tagging system

BurdaForward's new "Sugarless" data strategy is based on context targeting, a technology that has long been part of online marketing, and combines it with content targeting - the semantic analysis of texts. A "Semantic Intelligence System", which is developed in-house, uses machine learning to build up a dense, constantly evolving data structure in a targeted manner. It is fed by daily new content and existing articles on all BurdaForward portals. The system allows specific customer requirements to be automatically taken into account in order to optimize campaigns. Sugarless thus boosts performance: In the future, advertising that uses components of "Sugarless" will be characterized by high performance and scalability. "We are convinced that the acceptance of advertising will increase if it is thematically oriented to what users read every day in news and background reports," says Martin Lütgenau.

The system does not just recognize individual words. It can analyze content, establish meaning relationships and link them to advertising messages. To do this, attributes are named and classified into target groups, moods, topics, problem solutions or buying propensity. BurdaForward maintains this data tagging across platforms and integrates it into editorial workflows.

Good ingredients as the basis for goodvertising

BurdaForward reaches more than 44 million Internet users every month (AGOF ddf 2020-05) with free, advertising-financed content. Making journalistic content freely available to everyone is part of our mission to support people in their everyday lives with good news. As an integrated publisher and marketer, the company has successfully pursued its own "goodvertising" strategy since 2015: advertising should be useful, informative and entertaining. A prerequisite for this is the delivery of advertising to the right people and target groups. With the "Sugarless" data system, we can name the good ingredients, i.e. the semantic features, precisely map the interests of the users and thus enable advertisers to bring their communication goals to the customers in a targeted manner.

New Podcast: Why "Sugarless" is also "Datalicious"!

 So "Sugarless" is a doubly tasty solution to the data problem of the advertising industry: "Sugarless" is so important to us that we not only call our new Semantic Intelligence System "Sugarless", but also our new strategy of content and context targeting. In the new podcast "Datalicious", Carsten Sander, Executive Director Monetization Technology, explains why "Sugarless" is a healthy example from our own development and market solution, what advantages the system offers and what comes next.