Audience targeting appears to be entering a third age. After initial buying of ads against content that delivers key demographics, marketers have been in thrall to laser-targeting audiences, no matter they content they are consuming. Now we are seeing “contextual targeting”, the data-driven practice of buying content, not audiences, rise up.

But not only can these disciplines mix – in the current business environment, they are all necessary, says Fiona Carter, the chief brand officer of AT&T, who oversees global brand marketing, advertising, media, sponsorships, global events and corporate and employee communications for the telecommunications firm.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Carter explains how AT&T, which operates the Xandr advertising unit, is having to adapt to a changing world.

Uncertainty abounds

“People keep asking when will the (TV sales) upfront start,” she tells Beet.TV. “I stumbled across a quote the other day from (Disney executive chairman) Bob Iger, who I think was asked ‘When will the Disney parks reopen?’, and he said, ‘No dates, just data‘. I think that’s what is guiding us.

“There are so many variables right now when it comes to the upfront. I don’t know when live sports will begin. I don’t know what I can buy at a traditional upfront.

“I don’t know when there’ll be new episodes, original content. I don’t know, frankly, if upfront pricing drops below scatter pricing, whether I’ll get a return on that.

“We’re now operating with a new set of principles.”

Four pandemic principles

So, Carter and AT&T are a new mix comprising four goals:

1. “Eyeball-heavy content“: Carter wants big-hitting content where it is left in production. She cites live news and innovative spins on remote production used by the likes of Saturday Night Live. “I’m laser focused on identifying the kind of premium programming,” Carter says.
2. “Truly surgical“: “How can I go and find the audiences that I need right now?,” Carter asks, explaining that AT&T has to keep explaining telecommunications to first-responder networks and enterprises. “I have very, very precise targeting and surgical needs.”
3. “Be adaptive“: “Never before have we seen so much change, so much evolution and such a dynamic movement in how people are thinking and feeling and what they’re doing. Frankly, I need my media to be able to adjust to that.”
4. “I just want a great partner“: “I can’t be working with different teams. I want a coalition and I want us all focus ultimately on the right goal.”

“What if, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the internet had buckled?”

Keeping our network connected didn't happen by accident. We took @TheAtlantic behind the scenes to see how we did it: https://t.co/WJTcChpCKt

Image via Paul Spella / The Atlantic pic.twitter.com/8dxBE6QrPr

— AT&T News (@ATTNEWS) May 6, 2020

Demographics + Context

Precision-targeting is important because the old certainties of finding audiences through content designed to serve up known demographics have suddenly been shifted.

Until March, advertisers could rely on programmers to serve up key audiences through, for example sport programming.

Carter doesn’t think that tactic will go away. She sees context and audience targeting as complementary.

But, in the current moment, many advertisers appear to be using audience targeting to find needles in the absence of a haystack.

“Think about a business decision maker target, for example,” she says. “The traditional approach to marketing … (is) advertising … in the traditional contextual placements.

“(But) I know that they’re really heavy streamers of video. I know that they love sports. I know they actually love listening to podcasts, and I know that they’re probably 50% millennials. That really transforms the way you think about going to find that audience.”

How do you keep a floating hospital connected? Here’s the story of @FirstNet @ATT acting in record time for #firstresponders and the @mercyship19 in the @PortofLA. #ConnectedTogether pic.twitter.com/ddnTVOtYZE

— Fiona Carter (@FionaCarter) April 20, 2020

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

TV marketplace is moving inexorably to an “audience-based” world.   It’s time to move past the way things have been done for 40 years and look at the way it could be in 12 months, she urges.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.  

What resulted was an ad that featured front-line workers and how AT&T was helping them solve business and technology problems on the fly. According to  SVP of news content partnerships for WarnerMedia Ad Sales and head of Courageous Studios Michal Shapira, speaking to Beet.TV, the storytelling was “relevant and passionate,”

More brands are turning to Courageous for help navigating their communications and marketing strategies during Covid-19. The branded content studio, with its ties to CNN, has journalism at its DNA, says Shapira, and it uses those instincts and tactics to develop cultural stories on behalf of brands. In any environment, brands are looking to relay interesting, purpose-driven and relevant stories to customers. Now, the stakes are higher, customers are in a rapidly evolving and uncertain time and the risk of coming off as tone deaf or insensitive is a one weighing heavily on brands.

“We’ve helped our clients develop purpose-driven campaigns that are authentic. It’s natural to us at a time when a lot of brands are looking to do that type of campaign or creative, and want to tell their own purpose-driven stories as they relate to the health crisis,” says Shapira. The biggest challenge, for Courageous as well as the brands, is being nimble enough to respond when the situation changes. “What might work today may not work two weeks from now,” she says.

Finding and sending the right message is part of the battle. Data analytics still need to inform purpose-driven marketing. Courageous works with Xandr to deliver branded content to the right audiences. In addition to targeting, Xandr provides data on audiences that can help brands inform their creative campaigns ensuring that content isn’t uniform.

Shapira says that this approach helps brands maintain a presence during an undeniably difficult time for advertising.

“A lot of [brands] feel strongly about having a presence right now, and not going dark,” she says. “Their customers want to hear from them; they want to be there for them and we want to help them do that.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

According to DeCicco, four key variables are impacting how audience planning is evolving right now: privacy and consent, depreciation of cookies and the future of identity, the increasing height of the walled gardens and number of walls being erected, and the pressures being created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“COVID has forced really every one of our brands to evolve their understanding of their target audience and how best to reach them and how best to communicate with them.” DeCicco said.

Mindshare is performing a weekly consumer insights study on COVID-19, and it’s showing that clients must react to three new realities: changes in channel consumption, purchase behavior, and hyperlocality. Users are increasing their time of consumption in every category from video to podcast streaming.

“It’s forcing us to use our scenario planning tools and reallocate marketing mix if you are going to continue advertising during this.” DeCicco said. “That’s because we’re seeing not all channels being created equal during this time. The rate of consumption increases by channel is different. So you need to look at each channel individually, how the rate of change is happening within the channel among your most valuable consumers, and then reprioritize which channels to spend against.”

Purchase behavior has also changed drastically in some categories like groceries where the industry has had to pivot to ecommerce and a new online strategy. Consumers are buying these products, but very differently. These consumer behaviors are becoming more in line with local communities.

“As consumers get more connected to their communities during this time out of necessity or emerging habit, which again is a shift from where we’ve collectively been going as a more globally minded society,” DeCicco said. “But due to these restrictions on the way consumers can engage now, location has become much more critical to understanding and determining how to capitalize on certain behaviors and in many ways it’s becoming the determining factor of how people are behaving right now.”

The role of context to inform both audience and content is becoming much more intertwined, too. Even in a post-cookie world, there are three key data signals that still persist and inform how people invest in media: customer data, publisher data, and context.

First-party customer records are key to unlocking loyalty strategies and prospecting strategies. The publisher data signal is also important because anyone who can offer content for customer data and can successfully monetize that data can compete in the marketing ecosystem.

“The notion of more walled gardens probably generates a collective shudder among the advertising community,” DeCicco said. “But I think these publishers, these, dare I say, fenced gardens, will be a little bit more willing and creative to bring opportunities to advertisers using not just their data but their powerful content publishing arms to create unique experiences and that’s something that the big four-walled gardens can’t necessarily do.”

The third signal, context, is still critically important and is fueled by a new wave of innovation that is making technologies more precise and intelligent around audience and content.

“So it’s really going to be that marriage between audience and contextual data,” DeCicco said. “That will be the new way forward. Especially as the scale of certain types of behavioral data sets wanes with the depreciation of third-party cookies.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.  

Amplifi is a unit of the Dentsu Aegis Network.

Companies have gotten better at using data to identify clients’ most valuable audiences, and it’s important they don’t lose perspective of where those ads should run. Instead, it’s crucial to holistically focus on finding the right people in the right place, which is where this mix of targeting tools and contextual marketing becomes all the more crucial.

“It is really critical that we bring those two things together so we think about contextual alignment matched up against audience definition when we’re placing our buys across all channels,” Law says.

In order for Amplifi to do this, the company utilizes the M1 tool in partnership with Merkle as well as other data platforms. But a big part of finding success is for data analytics companies to forge partnerships with media owners that have vast content libraries and use them to inform the most appropriate buys.

Law added that audience-based guarantees are increasingly becoming a bigger part of the picture, too, as the industry moves from demographics to audiences. Access to greater data has meant greater precision in reaching people, and this idea of reach is particularly important looking forward.

“Reach is a big story in today’s marketplace,” Law said. “To make sure that we’re using the data not just to think about audiences per se, but how do we think about audiences defined by light TV viewers as much as we’re thinking about audiences as those most likely to buy a car, those most likely to shop at a retail outlet, those most likely to make a purchase in a bar or a restaurant?”

For these reasons, Law argues that the industry needs to move away from legacy behaviors, and trend towards reaching people in real time to drive business outcomes.

In these particularly trying times, Law says that Amplifi has been working off of a framework but with a recognition that the current obstacles are unlike anything before. Their course of action is to gather as much information as possible and be in frequent communication with partners to gather an understanding of their current challenges.

“Right now, we’ve just been in a hyper-communicative state, trying to share as much as we can,” Law says. “Consistency of communication, transparency of communication, partnership, and making sure we’re sharing all we can and making the best decisions for each and every one of our clients to get through this.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.  

Case in point – to find viewers who would otherwise have watched sports events that have been cancelled, some brands are turning to audience targeting, which helps them find the same audiences though they may now be watching other content.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, WarnerMedia SVP of ad innovation and programmatic solutions, Dan Aversano, says explains what is happening.

Finding sports viewers

“We represent a lot of sports properties and we’re not running any of those sports right now,” he says.

“We had a lot of marketing partners who were banking on being able to connect with those fans in those highly engaging environments. So we’ve pivoted and started to leverage a lot of our advanced solutions… whether it was things like audience targeting… so that we could help people find those highly, highly engaged sports fans, but in other forums, in other venues.

“(That is) so we can build segments based on previous viewership of things like the NCAA tournament or NBA games, and now find those consumers for our marketing partners in other areas and in other content or context.”

In other words, WarnerMedia is finding the needle even though there is no haystack.

Key takeaways today from our first ever Xandr-hosted webinar in the US include the importance of building trust by staying relevant with brands/customers now more than ever, to take an Audience-first mindset and approach today, and that day parts are being rewritten. pic.twitter.com/2heRR8d0iG

— Xandr (@xandr) April 28, 2020

Change is good

Sports is one area of content that looks challenged for the foreseeable future, as many competitions wrestle with competing imperatives – the need to resume play, and the likelihood that spectators will either be forbidden from attending or will be reluctant to.

For Aversano, COVID-19 has made clear the need to quickly adapt the changing circumstances.

“This industry is learning a lesson right now about speed and agility that’s really important,” he says.

“The legacy media business has historically not been known for being a massive embracer of change, not been known for being extremely dynamic in how we adapt. I think what you’re seeing right now is a lot of pain in organisations that have not been able to adapt quickly.

“And my hope is that you’re going to see companies who embrace the need for agility and the need to be adaptable in times.”

Audience and context

Over the last year, as new privacy regulation and the looming death of cookies have put the brakes on the high points of advanced audience targeting, we have seen the re-emergence of contextual ad targeting, which seeks to buy ads against particular kinds of topics or emotional responses.

The two – audience and context – are thus being seen by many as operating at two distinct ends of the marketing spectrum.

Indeed, WarnerMedia is showing how brands can substitute the context of sports for the precision of audience targeting.

But Aversano doesn’t think one technique necessarily trumps the other.

“It really shouldn’t be a debate,” he says. “It’s really not ‘one or the other?’ You functionally need both.

“Who you talk to, what you say to them, your creative message, how many times you say it, the content or context with which you say it… these are all important levers that a marketer can pull.

“It’s not any one of them individually that works in isolation. They all actually have to work together.”

WarnerMedia’s COVID-19 response has also included CNN match-funding purpose-driven digital ad buys and committing further TV inventory to public health campaigns, a basketball Twitter talk show from Turner’s involvement in Sports and free content for HBO Go, HBO Now and international channels.

As part of its Tech for Good program, @xandr is partnering with organizations including the @CDCgov and @AdCouncil to educate the public about ways to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. Read more @iab members’ Good Works: https://t.co/WlIZZdKB0C pic.twitter.com/pFVdsm3ejc

— IAB (@iab) April 15, 2020

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

Jeremy Cohen, the vp and head of global content partnerships at Publicis Groupe, says consumers are “hyper-tuned” to the digital experience right now – meaning they have less patience for poor ad experiences but will be responsive when the messaging, tone and positioning is right. 

“It’s important in this COVID environment that people feel supported across the board,” Cohen says. “Everyone wants to feel like an individual.” 

A few converging strategies can support that mission, which according to Cohen boils down to a “consumer first is key” mindset. First, he says, audience based targeting and contextual targeting can be leveraged at the same time to understand what audiences are consuming from a content perspective and personalization perspective. “So creating what seems to be a personalized experience by leveraging both audience-level data and contextual targeting, that drives the greatest outcome for brands and efficiencies as well,” Cohen says. 

It’s impossible to discuss targeting and personalization right now with mourning the long, belabored death of the cookie. Third-party cookies are in the process of being wiped out by Google, which, while not entirely unexpected, sent the marketing world into a tailspin. Cohen chooses to see it as an advantage for brands and a return of creativity. This time, it will be bolstered by data.

“The cookie is a tax. It’s so widespread, it’s not a strategy,” says Cohen. “Now that it’s going away, brands have more opportunity to create their own unique strategies to give them advantages in the marketplace.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

That means brands and publishers have to change their messaging. “Context is even more important now,” says Scott. Context has always been a “proxy for audience”, she adds. If you contextually understand behavior, intent, interest and demographic, you understand your audience. Xandr, the advertising and analytics arm of AT&T, is analyzing what strategies are emerging and what’s resonating. As Scott points out, brands are most embracing the “empathy and humanity angle,” with messages like “stay at home, save lives.”

“Making your creative and your messaging really engaging and getting to the heart of people – brands can lean into that,” Scott says. It’s certainly not the time for the hard sell or aggressive performance metrics. Unless you’re a brand primed for performance right now, like one selling hand sanitizer, that is.

It’s also time to embrace technology and new ad formats that brands might have otherwise been leaving to the wayside. “This is a world on demand,” Scott says. “So being able to adapt to that kind of consumption is needed.”

That could mean testing out artificial intelligence or live shoppable content, something that NBCUniversal’s new universal checkout platform could help facilitate. Right now, people may be open to buying in unexpected places, and brands should test that.

“Creative is evolving to meet the temperament of the new viewer,” Scott says.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

In contextual targeting, ad buyers would seek optimal adjacency to various kinds of content.

But, to Raja Rajamannar, there is one overriding context that everyone shares in 2020 – a global pandemic.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, the CMO of Mastercard says brands need to recalibrate their messaging because a number of tectonic shifts have occurred.

“Data clearly shows that people’s movement patterns have dramatically altered,” he says. “The screens that they are watching has dramatically changed, the mix of the screens, and the kind of content that they are watching has changed.

“Right now the larger context is that the whole world is in a crisis. So be attuned to it, be appropriate in terms of what you’re communicating.”

Change your plan

Rajamannar thinks the ongoing pandemic crisis has thrown consumers in to a number of different contexts, and that means brands must adapt.

“Once you have got this data, for every brand, you need to identify, in addition to the right audience, the right context in which you are going to communicate your message in a most appropriate tone and manner,” he says.

“You need to really make sure is that you are absolutely tweaking, or correcting, or modifying your media plans completely based on the new audience behaviour, and their viewing habits, and viewing patterns.

You’re in the business of selling some luxury product, you have to be much more careful. A lot of people have lost their jobs … You cannot be tone-deaf and say, here is a fantastic luxury product that you should (buy). The message is critical, the product that you’re selling is critical. The context is very important.”

Out of context

An article by Gartner senior director analyst Laurel Erickson last week brought the problem of context and tone in to sharp focus.

She was taken aback by seeing an ad depicting a woman jumping for joy, placed in an article about COVID-19 deaths.

“Your users have landed on your site in the middle of stressful days probably filled with worry and uncertainty,” Erickson writes, making four recommendations: “Check tone”, “Provide easy access to COVID-19 specific content,” “Adjust to current traffic trends” and “Adjust to current consumer concerns”.

Consider These COVID-19 Content Adjustments to Your Website

Digital ads down

A follow-up survey of brands and agencies conducted by Advertiser Perceptions shows that, in the last few weeks, they have become progressively more worried that the impact on advertising will worsen in Q2 and will stretch in to Q4 and Q4.

Of the immediate impact, the worst may be experienced by digital media. A UBS survey of ad executives shows “ad spending in digital is down over 45% year to date and is expected to drop by that same amount for the rest of the year”, Yahoo Finance reports.

According to an IAB survey, digital display is pegged for the biggest short-term dip in digital ad revenue, eMarketer says.

But the extent of any digital retrenchment may be exaggerated by the extent to which it has long since been the dominant ad channel.

An analysis by Enders Analysis, published Monday, says: “Almost all the evidence we have is that advertising budgets, including online, have been massacred.”

Futuresource Consulting says: “We should expect to see a long-term reinvention in advertising, as the industry will be pressured to make up the shortfall in revenue.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

Still, the chief investment officer of Kinesso, the division IPG launched in October to provide data-driven capabilities to clients, thinks the unit has plenty of work to do.

Chief amongst that work is connecting.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Paolozzi says Kinesso, which is powered by Acxiom after IPG acquired the company, exists to help brands deploy their customer data for advertiser targeting.

“As (IPG) went through that (Acxiom) integration process, I think we started to see that there was this gap in the industry between sort of the back office, mar-tech of understanding client consumer CRM data sets to the front end office of ad-tech and connections into things like addressable buying platforms or ‘How do you connect the dots between the two?’,” Paolozzi says.

“With that gap, we decided to launch Kinesso to really focus on building this application layer of connecting the dots from the back-office CRM datasets or our client’s first-party data back into the media world. We’ve been focused on connecting the dots between those two things.”

Marrying datasets

As the advertising world looks beyond cookie-based targeting and beyond the world of audience targeting, many marketers are starting to focus less on precision-targeting unknown users and more on targeting users known to their own in-house databases.

Vinesso thinks there is potential in “connecting the dots” between that and publisher’s own first-party data about their consumers. So he says Kinesso has been “working with publishers” to connect their data to the data Kinesso has available from Acxion.

“As we’ve transformed into this world of one to one addressable audience buying, we’re starting to think of how the two worlds come together,” he explains. “The combination of the two is can be really powerful.

“You might be finding niche audiences that are within those environments that have a different way of wanting to be spoken to or ways to be messaged to. The combination becomes extremely powerful with having two together at the same time.”

In times of crisis

Kinesso is comprised of IPG’s addressable activation team Cadreon and its  Data and Technology group. Kinesso will work with IPG Mediabrands, Acxiom and will provide services to agencies across the IPG network.

It expected to have a staff of 1,400 in more than 70 countries this year.

Paolozzi says the current pandemic is causing travel advertisers to attempt “trying to figure out their approach for the rest of the year”, whilst quick-service restaurants are having to recalibrate after moving to delivery-only.

“And so there’s a constant change and challenge of the complexities of ‘How do you work within that environment?,” he says.

“With all challenge comes opportunity for innovation and new ways of thinking where technology can help support how to create more efficiency across your business.”

In this #Viewpoints piece, find out why Mark Donatelli, SVP Global Client Solutions, believes that identity is a spectrum and adopting a people-first approach to identity produces the best results // https://t.co/8vAiGcokSc pic.twitter.com/cUEvzolpRZ

— Kinesso (@kinesso) April 9, 2020

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

One of the leading contenders – contextual targeting, the practice of seeking out ad inventory adjacent to particular kinds of content, rather than targeting individual users, no matter what content they are consuming.

But, whilst the emergence of contextual targeting is being framed as the flip-side of audience targeting, Rachel Gantz says there is no dichotomy.

“I think it’s the wrong question,” says Comscore’s general manager for activation, in this video interview with Beet.TV. “It’s not ‘either-or?’. It’s not ‘audience or contextual?’. The question should be ‘how do I get the best out of both?’

Context for COVID-19

Gantz has a prescient example. She says many advertisers that had allocated budget to sporting events now cancelled by the global COVID-19 pandemic are seeking an alternative way to reach the same kind of audience.

“So we’re seeing a huge surge in demand for some of our sports fan audiences…  viewers of sporting events from past seasons … for things like golf and baseball,” Gantz says.

“But then you layer on that contextually relevant piece. One example was … a CPG company who had tagged a lot of money for part of their media plan for sporting events.

“(They) still wanted to reach those audiences, but they wanted to do so in food- and recipe-oriented content. That’s that contextual layer that you can put on top of that.”

As COVID-19 continues to spread, local television viewing habits are shifting. Join us on April 14 as we talk about the impact on local markets and share insights on what trends are emerging across the U.S. https://t.co/Er3dVXWaWo #coffeewithcomscore #TV #coronavirus

— Comscore (@Comscore) April 8, 2020

Beyond cookies

Gantz says Comscore is partnering with ad platforms like Xandr to bring cookie-free, contextually-based demographics to market.

“For example, in Europe where GDPR impacted countries, (we can) take some of those tenets of age and gender targeting and make that available in a contextual standpoint,” she adds.

“Where the industry is going is to expand that to behavioural audiences, and really merge those two.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

Consulting is one of the many parts of Horizon’s business model, and it’s one where Williams sees a great opportunity. There are a lot of businesses whose core value propositions aren’t relevant or can’t exist right now because of COVID-19, so there’s a great need for realizing a marketing and communications strategy that helps to pivot their business in an effective way.

“For us, there are countless brands that have been sidelined because of this pandemic,” Williams says. “And instead of it being kind of a management of a portfolio of media investments, it becomes kind of a consultative approach to understanding the business viability and the opportunity to shift strategy from an operations standpoint.”

For many brands who have relied heavily on sporting events to stay relevant and convey value, Williams said that they have had to reimagine how to pivot these brands to get in front of the right audience and keep the scale and volume required to drive the same level of success.

“It’s been a lot of optimizing around consumer behavior – leaning into digital channels,” Williams says. “And then it’s been a lot of pivoting around messaging so that there’s something more relevant and potentially less opportunistic to share out during this sensitive period of time.”

One example that Williams gives is brands shifting the focus of TV ads from a promotional value proposition to providing more consumer options around things like payment flexibility or low-contact delivery.

Some brands, however, have been fully sidelined by COVID-19, and Williams says that this is a problem across the industry. Still, many of the responses from advertisers have been unsurprising.

“You’ve seen folks gravitate towards more measurable and accountable channels,” Williams says. “We’ve seen some drop off in traditional media; we’ve seen some recovery in what have historically been referred to as lower-funnel marketing activities including affiliate marketing and surge marketing and to a lesser extent social marketing as well. I think you’re going to see folks gravitate towards those types of performance-related channels because they’re flexible and they’re dynamic both on the messaging side of things and on the media side of things.”

These lower-risk advertisements give way to a great importance around measurement and data. Williams says that all of the data and performance-based parts of Horizon Media are high traffic right now because marketers are needing greater insight more than ever. While these insights won’t be fully clear until the third quarter, Williams has already picked up on some trends.

“I think you’re going to see people really lean into some of the behaviors we’re seeing including connected and OTT inventory really spiking,” Williams says. “Marketers are going to figure out how to use dynamic assets in those environments in a scalable way so that spend should pick up pretty quickly as well.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

Amongst the leading contenders – contextual advertising, the practise of targeting not the audience for content but the content itself.

As contextual ad targeting gains prominence in 2020, many people are coming to liken it to the traditional craft of pre-digital ad adjacencies, and as the flip-side to data-driven digital ad targeting.

But Lisa Giacosa doesn’t see it that way. In this video interview with Beet.TV, the president and global head of data, technology, analytics and insights at Publicis Groupe’s Spark Foundry agency says it’s not an “either-or”.

Powerful combination

“I think it (should be) both,” Giacosa says.

“Contextual, to me, is making sure that you have the right type of environment, the right type of content and the right type of message jiving together and working as hard as possible for your brand, so that your consumer deems it as ‘relevant to me, right for me, and a brand that I want to build a connection with and have in my life’.

“But all of the data-driven targeting is what helps us to understand that context.

“When you bring the two things together, it’s even more powerful in terms of understanding who, when, where, and how we’re going to target our audiences.”

Beyond cookies

For ad-tech companies facing the death of cookies and the ramifications of GDPR and CCPA in 2020 and beyond, “context” is the new black.

Giacosa isn’t crying over the end of the humble traditional user tracking file. She says the end of cookies is “exciting”.

“It served a purpose for a while in that cookies were a great way of us measuring digital media in a silo,” she says. “(But) I want to look at that whole holistic mix.

“We survived a long time with TV with no cookies, and we will survive without cookies again.”

Emotional connection

Attempts at reconstituting consumer targeting and profile consolidation continue apace.

Last year, Spark Foundry’s parent Publicis Groupe acquired data marketing business Epsilon for $4.5 billion, enabling mass ad personalization and what Giacosa calls a “true picture” of users.

All of which, plus the addition of contextual cues, makes advertising not just about data but about psychology.

With all those pieces combined, Giacosa is using words like “mindset”, “feeling”, “tonality”, “experience” and “emotional connection” to describe advertisers’ imperatives.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

But how can they best serve audiences in order to hold on to new users after the lockdowns end?

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Nielsen’s EVP for media and marketing effectiveness Tina Wilson says traffic is booming – but publishers need to think hard about what to do with it.

“We had estimates of close to 12 hours a day that consumers were connecting with media and that continues to increase,” Wilson says. “Right now where we’re seeing the biggest increase is in streaming.

“We’re able to look at the last week of March relative to the first week of March, and it’s up almost three hours per person per week.”

Holding on

When it comes to their strategy, news and video publishers are faced with interesting choices, because users fall into different camps.

Much of the new news traffic is going to coronavirus stories, as consumers show a voracious appetite for virus content

But, for many consumers, the whole episode is also an anxiety-inducer, pushing them to seek out content on different topics.

Parsely data shows coronavirus-focused users are engaging with content for longer.

But Taboola published data it says shows news website traffic “returning to normal”.

News website traffic is quickly returning to normal. Compared to a 6-month, pre-corona average, traffic was up just 7% globally and 13% in the US last week.

The peaks were +41% globally and +52% for the US. pic.twitter.com/SLVknE75AB

— Fran Berkman (@FranBerkman) April 13, 2020

So, what should publishers do?

Choice & connection

Nielsen’s Wilson says it is about “ensuring that there is the content (available), that there is this selection and the choice that draws people in from an originals and from an exclusive standpoint”.

“Really understanding the role that the content plays not just for educating, or informing, or providing an escape, but also that it’s providing a social connection right now (is important),” she says.

“I think (that) is really, really important and one for them to look, to sustain past this time that we’re in today.”

Wilson says Nielsen wants advertisers to move beyond demographic ad targeting, toward understanding audiences and measuring outcomes. Finding the right content is key, she says.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

All of that action presents an opportunity for Omnicom, which has been investing heavily in streaming and connected TV over the last few years, according to Sullivan.

“I only see that accelerating,” she tells Beet.TV during a remote BeetCam interview. “We’re excited about the opportunity to bring this all together, regardless of how a consumer is watching content. They have the ability to watch it linearly and digitally, and when you layer in behavioral targeting, that could be the holy grail in terms of getting linear to act more digitally and remove some of the friction.”

Omnicom works with Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising company, which is working with AMC Networks, Disney and WarnerMedia in a partnership announced in March to work toward a new linear buying and selling solution. Through that partnership, tools that Omnicom Media built with Xandr to facilitate more advanced linear targeting and measurement will be adopted by major media companies.

“They’ll be one asset for us to go push the envelope for demographic CPMs in the audience-based world,” says Sullivan of Omnicom’s work with Xandr. “Most media companies are finding new meaning, and understanding that in order to compete for the full funnel of dollars out there, they’re going to have to get into audience-based buying and targeting.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr. For more videos please visit this page.   

In addition to brands serving their customers and communities, the ANA and many of its members have joined the Ad Council in a nation campaign to #StayHome, Save Lives.

In the interview, he urges brands to pick the right time to enter re-enter the market,  but suggests that investment should be maintained to keep brand equity and value.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

That is according to one ad executive who says companies need to be able to find their own audience amongst the newly-inflated base of stay-at-home media consumers.

Get personal amid virus

“The need for personalization on direct-to-consumer relationships from brands will just heighten,” says Jason Brown, chief revenue officer of AT&T’s Xandr advertising company.

“The capabilities that come out of products like addressability and the ability to precision-target and frequency-manage will become more relevant for clients as they try to personalize the messages to their current customers and also their prospects.

“In this environment, with COVID, I believe we’ll start to use those production capabilities for brands just to message directly to consumers.”

Go direct

Brown cites the example of one Xandr client, a financial services institution that is using first-party data on its own customers together with viewership insights from AT&T to connect with its customers, making clear how its online banking products allow them to go on banking without visiting a branch.

The consulting firm Prophet says brands can thrive out of COVID-19 by being customer-obsessed, ruthlessly pragmatic, distinctively inspired and pervasively innovative.

According to an Unruly survey, consumers say they want brands to continue advertising, but to be more informative.

Its data showed some brands had seen an uplift in shareability and some brands had helped consumers feel more informed.

Branded content, too

The pandemic is putting brands’ commitment to purpose to the test. GroupM representatives have encouraged brands to be useful at this moment in time.

Brown says one consequence of a burgeoning growth in at-home media consumption is the risk a brand’s ad may get shown too many times to viewers – a reason frequency management capabilities may be necessary.

But he says commercials aren’t the only tool in the chest. Brown sees brand content messages as being deliverable on a personalized basis to specific audiences, too.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.   

“It’s not the time to sell, it’s a time to serve,” he cautions the industry.  Marketers have to make real commitments to the crisis, not superficial ones, he says.

Rajamannar outlines the approach of Mastercard around its employees well being and workload during the crisis.

He also spoke about Mastercard’s commitment of up to $125 million to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for funding of research for treatment of COVID-19.  And explained Mastercard’s commitment to a program that provides lessons to girls in tech.  

This is interview was recorded remotely.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series  titled “Audience, in Context,” presented by Xandr.  For more videos please visit this page.