The Big Impression – People Inc.’s Jonathan Roberts on the Untapped Power of Content

Podcast: The Big Impression
Host(s): Damian Fowler, Ilyse Liffreing (The Current)
Guest: Jonathan Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer, People Inc.
Date: September 10, 2025

Overview

In this episode, Damian Fowler interviews Jonathan Roberts, Chief Innovation Officer at People Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), about the renaissance in contextual advertising powered by AI and how it’s shaping the future of privacy-first, content-driven targeting. Roberts discusses the evolution and philosophy behind “Decipher,” People Inc’s AI platform, the strategic use of intent signals, the essential value of quality content in the AI era, and lessons from his unique background as a physicist and fantasy mapmaker. The conversation covers the technical and philosophical underpinnings of building premium, scalable ad products for today’s privacy-conscious world.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Rethinking Audience Targeting Post-Merger

• Why Context Matters:

  • People Inc’s web properties (e.g., Better Homes and Gardens, Health.com, AllRecipes) are visited with a purpose—helping audiences make purchasing decisions and manage life.
  • “If you go to Better Homes and Gardens to understand how to refresh your living room for spring, you're going to go in to purchase a lot of stuff for your living room...These are all places where the publisher and the content is a critical path on the purchase to doing something like an economically valuable something.” (Jonathan Roberts, 01:17)

• Decipher Platform Origins:

  • Decipher uses the real-time intent signaled by current content consumption to target ads, rather than relying on retrospective cookie data.
  • “What you're reading right now tells us a lot more about who you are and what you're going to do than a cookie signal, which is two days late and not relevant.” (Jonathan Roberts, 02:50)

Moving From “Old” Contextual to AI-Powered Contextual

• Contextual ads of the past were simplistic; new systems analyze cross-property behaviors for deeper intent detection.

  • “2001 called and wants its ad targeting strategy back...All things are new again and I think they're newly fresh and newly relevant, newly accurate because we can do things now that we were never able to do before.” (Jonathan Roberts, 03:53)

• Network Effects and Data Scale:

  • By owning diverse premium content brands, People Inc. can detect cross-site behaviors and connections (e.g., a pet site visitor over-indexing for cleaning tips on Real Simple).
  • “If you take a health site...we can see all the signals of exactly what help you need with your diet...We have about 1500 different topics that we track across all of DDM, across 1.5 million articles, tens of millions of visits a day...” (Jonathan Roberts, 04:30–06:37)

Scientific Background and Approach

• From Physics and Mapmaking to Ad Tech:

  • Roberts’s training at CERN and as a fantasy mapmaker informed his approach to modeling data as “human interest telescopes.”
  • “If you treat as a physicist coming in I looked at this and like this is a...telescope recording all of human interest...Each piece of content is like a single pixel...” (Jonathan Roberts, 07:35)

• Data as Experimental Framework:

  • Understanding consistent human intent and predicting changes via real-time data parallels scientific experimentation.

Partnership with OpenAI: AI’s Role in Contextual Targeting

• First US Publisher to Strike a Deal

  • Three-pronged arrangement: OpenAI trained on People Inc’s content; they must source/cite it; and both sides co-develop new technology.
  • “OpenAI paid for training...agreed to source and cite our content...and the third part...is co-development of new things.” (Jonathan Roberts, 09:13–09:33)

• AI vs. Classical Machine Learning:

  • AI enables deeper conceptual matching between content, beyond just keyword overlap—improving the quality of intent signals.
  • “With AI you go from the word to the concept to the reasoning behind it...if they didn't use the same words, but they were talking about the same topic, the previous system would have missed it. This system gets deeper.” (Jonathan Roberts, 09:47)

• Scaling with “Decipher Plus”:

  • The technology is now used both on People Inc’s sites and across the open web, utilizing OpenAI’s vector embeddings to map and buy intent-driven ad opportunities beyond proprietary content.

Why Publishers Lagged Behind in Ad Tech

• Ad Tech’s “Original Sin”:

  • 20+ years of cookie-centric ad targeting devalued publisher knowledge and encouraged cheap scale over premium content.
  • “Cookies as a currency for advertising and targeting is the reason we currently have the Internet we deserve, not the Internet we want, because the incentive is to cheap scale.” (Jonathan Roberts, 13:57)

• Contextual Renaissance:

  • With Decipher, focus shifts back to content quality, publisher knowledge, and value-based ad placements.

Quality Control Across Platforms

• Purging Low-Value Content:
  • Every publisher acquired by People Inc. undergoes a rigorous content quality audit.
  • “Every time we have bought a publisher we have had to clean up the content...The other side is the actual ad layout has to be good, but every time we picked up a publisher, we've removed ads from the site quality.” (Jonathan Roberts, 15:39–16:36)
  • Proprietary tools and experience allow People Inc. to select truly premium inventory for partners.

Privacy, Performance, and Brand Safety

• Addressability Without IDs:

  • Decipher can reach users in real-time without personal data, making it “100% addressable, full national reach, complete privacy compliance, because it's Just the content, total brand safety.” (Jonathan Roberts, 17:21)

• Performance Guarantees:

  • The platform guarantees to outperform cookie-based targeting on ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) for specific campaigns.

Advertising's Evolving ROI Demands

• Advertisers’ Needs:

  • Current ROI climate is driven by high interest rates and cautious CMO budgeting—every ad dollar must show measurable return.
  • “We're never the last stop in that journey...we are in the path to purchase for every single purchase on earth.” (Jonathan Roberts, 18:41)

• Incremental Value Proof:

  • Decipher demonstrates not just ROAS, but incremental ROAS—showing the lift in sales directly attributable to the platform’s targeting.

Building for the Next Era

• Bringing in Experienced Leadership:

  • Appointed industry veterans with deep DSP and ad tech experience to scale Decipher from promising prototype to industry-standard platform.
  • “We have seasoned, multi decade experience pros doing the work. Because if you don't, you can have a good idea and bad execution, then you didn't do anything.” (Jonathan Roberts, 21:12)

• Scaling Intent Mapping Across the Web:

  • Decipher Plus aims to create a “map for all intent across the entire open web,” unlocking publisher value and giving advertisers cookie-competitive precision.

Looking to the Information Marketplace Future

• AI, Content, and the Information Economy:

  • Roberts is “obsessed” with what an information economy looks like in the AI age—how publishers, creators, and technologists will be incentivized and paid.
  • “If AI is powered by chips, power and content...content is probably the most undervalued at the moment.” (Jonathan Roberts, 22:46)
  • Building market structures now will determine whether the future supports quality journalism or is flooded by “cheap slop.”

• "Content is King" Redux:

  • As AI commoditizes reasoning, premium original content stands out as the true value differentiator for future search and discovery systems.
  • “If reasoning is a commodity, which it is now, then content Is king. Because reasoning on its own is free. But if you're granting it in quality content, your answer is better.” (Jonathan Roberts, 24:52)

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Real-time Contextual vs. Cookies:
  “What you did yesterday is less relevant to what you need to do than what you're doing right now...using content as a real time predictive signal is very, very performant.”
  — Jonathan Roberts (03:10)

• On the Shift Back to Content Value:
  “We had a 20 year distraction from understanding the value of content and we're only now coming back to...there are now multiple publishers coming out with similarly inspired targeting architecture...the market is moving.”
  — Jonathan Roberts (14:10)

• On Continuous Quality Control:
  “We've audited multiple publishers for the cleanup. We have an incredibly detailed understanding of what quality content is. We have lots of like, this is our special skill, like as a publisher.”
  — Jonathan Roberts (16:36)

• On Advertising’s Real Impact:
  “Turns out that's not the hardest conversation to have with marketers. Truly, truly. If you catch people at the right moment, you will change their mind.”
  — Jonathan Roberts (19:47)

• On Being a Mapmaker and Innovator:
  “Maps are infographics. A map is a way of taking a complex system that you cannot visualize and bringing it to a world in which you can reason about it...At this moment...there is no map for the future. Nobody has a map.”
  — Jonathan Roberts (25:42)

• Summary Philosophy:
  “Data is lovely, but unless you can do something with it, it's useless.”
  — Jonathan Roberts (27:21)

Timestamps for Significant Segments

• Introduction & Context Setting – 00:00–01:17
• Origins of Decipher and Content-Driven Targeting – 01:17–03:34
• AI-powered Contextual vs. Old-School Contextual – 03:53–06:37
• Scientific Background & Data Modeling – 07:03–08:59
• OpenAI Partnership and AI’s Deeper Insights – 09:13–11:56
• Helping the Broader Web: Decipher Plus – 12:01–14:09
• Quality Control and Content Clean-Up – 15:17–16:36
• Privacy, Performance, and Brand Safety Pitch – 17:21–18:29
• Ads ROI & Incremental Value – 18:34–20:10
• Scaling Decipher: Leadership & Team – 20:26–22:43
• Building the Future Information Economy – 22:46–25:23
• Lessons from Fantasy Mapmaking – 25:42–27:12

Conclusion

This episode of The Big Impression is a deep exploration of the challenges and opportunities facing publishers in a privacy-first, AI-driven era. Jonathan Roberts makes a powerful case for the enduring—and resurging—value of content as the core of advertising and AI ecosystems, and illustrates how “mapping” the future takes both data science and creative thinking. For marketers, publishers, and technologists alike, this episode offers optimism that quality journalism and audience understanding can, and must, prevail.