Contextual Targeting: The Future Looks Promising
Contextual ad targeting is being touted as the next big thing in the ad-tech world. So what is this contextual advertising? Contextual advertising is the process that matches ads to relevant content sites in any display network by using advertiser defined keywords and topics. Unlike popular belief contextual advertising is nothing new and has been present for a long time, in fact publishers have always created contextual private marketplace deals. Albeit now contextual might take a new avatar.
Why has contextual advertising risen to prominence once again?
To understand the rise in prominence of contextual advertising and find more than what meets the eye at the surface we need to dig deeper. Digital has always promised ads reaching the right person with the right message at the right time. However, in meeting this promise several challenges have cropped up overtime which the industry is yet to find a solution for. Some of these challenges include efficient marketing ROI, brand safe environment and data privacy compliance. The solution -third party cookies - was widely used till now, however had its own set of challenges such as uncertain quality of data and success of varying degrees in providing marketers with higher ROIs.
E.g. a third party cookie informs the system that a particular consumer is “female, with an income of above INR 1 million and is searching for personal care products”. While it's very hard to assess the authenticity of this particular cookie, this is much easier to assess in a contextual environment. E.g. a user reading an article on “best organic skin care products” is highly likely to be in the market for personal care products.
Premium publishers would be ideal for contextual targeting since they provide a plethora of contextual environments from news, business news to entertainment and lifestyle. The brand safe environments that these properties can help marketers across the marketing
Given privacy laws and third party cookie phase out by Google Chrome, is contextual just lucky by being at the right place and right time?
Contextual not only just bridges the gap left by absence of third party cookies but also solves for a variety of challenges such as brand safety and efficient ROI, among others. Let’s have a closer look for better understanding.
1. Efficient Marketing ROI
With growing pressure on marketers to justify each dollar spent on the marketing funnel right from the top of the funnel (awareness) to bottom of the funnel (action), the focus on ROI has increased multifold. In a 2017 study conducted by Advertising Research Foundation and IRI proved that programmatic ad buying on targeting is not very effective without context, attention and alignment. Moreover, the study proves that the context does matter for sales lift and ROI because context affects users' attention from content to the ad and has strong potential to influence the emotional state of the viewer. In fact, the results of the study showed ROI can be improved up to 30 percent when attention and alignment are part of the advertising strategy.
2. Brand Safe Environment
Brand safety is inherent to contextual advertising. Usually the content quality and hence, brand environment improves along with improvement in the reputation of the publisher. Hence, premium publishers would undoubtedly provide a brand safe environment to its advertiser because of carefully curated content creation.
Moreover, a good contextual targeting may lead to a shift away from the current block and white list. E.g. A perfect example of a current brand safe environment was highlighted during the pandemic by blacklisting ‘Covid19’ which led to blocking of ‘ALL’ articles related Covid19. This is a huge opportunity loss for all the advertisers because not all Covid19 articles were of negative connotation, on the contrary a huge percentage of articles were about ‘How to deal with it’ which could have been smartly leveraged by healthcare, hygiene and pharmaceutical brands.
3. Data Privacy Compliance
With the advent of GDPR and CCPA coming into effect and Google’s announcement of third party phase out media agencies would not see much incentive in chasing audience data. Contextual targeting’s executed pre-bid does not rely on cookies resulting in compliant with all current privacy legislation and browser requirements.
What’s next for contextual targeting?
Contextual with brand safety and a true understanding at the page level of images and content will bring up more advertising opportunities for premium publishers and publications that have niche, reliable and trustworthy content, even NEWS which currently gets blocked may observe a rise in advertising.
Contextual targeting has evolved with the need of the time although with its fair share of competition, but what’s important is the same could be expected in the future. With artificial intelligence already showing prominence, contextual targeting may evolve into contextual intelligence. With sophisticated algorithms understanding and segregating various formats of content across platforms contextually into advertising buckets and matching them with relevant ads and leveraging solutions that can translate first-party data into contextual targets, at scale.
Furthermore, this can also lead to a leaner supply chain as issues such as user content, data leakage and death of cookies would weed out intermediaries. Demand for premium publisher generated content would definitely uptick as users would be able to share data more freely with these brand conscious premium publishers, making a viral loop for these business houses. However, content won’t be the only important parameter device, platform, time and location would continue to add value for targeting and assisting advertisers to connect with audiences.
