“Contextual advertising feels a lot like ‘back to the future’ in the sense that we have been talking about it forever,” Joshua Lowcock, executive vice president and chief digital officer of UM Worldwide, said in this interview Beet.TV. “We pivoted to data-driven advertising and somewhat forgot about contextual until brand safety emerged as a challenge.”
He is optimistic that artificial intelligence (AI) technology will improve contextual targeting while also respecting consumer privacy.
“My biggest hope for contextual is that it opens the door to people thinking more intelligently about the mindset certain people are in when they’re consuming certain kinds of content,” Lowcock said.
Lowcock recommends that publishers harness the first-party data collected directly from their audiences to boost the value of their advertising inventories by helping marketers reach targeted consumer groups.
“Publishers are still the owners of first-party data and will be for the foreseeable future,” he said. “Blend contextual data with your first-party data, and that enables you to leverage the power of both contextual and first-party data for a better result at more efficient scale.”
Brands must align their ad creative with the surrounding content to optimize the effectiveness of contextual targeting.
“One of the things we don’t often talk about is from a purely media perspective is the creative message,” he said. “Most of the challenges that you have when contextual advertising goes wrong, it’s because the ad messaging itself is not as respectful of the contextual environment.”
AI technology can help to provide a more nuanced approach to contextual targeting that considers the reputation of a media company and the specific content it publishes. That approach is more effective than key-word blocking that can prevent ads from appearing alongside appropriate content.
“One of the greatest failings that contextual had in the past was that it was a blunt-force object, and it really was key-word targeting,” Lowcock said. “If we can move away from seeing key-word targeting as equaling contextual targeting, and use AI to mean semantic analysis, that’s when AI becomes a powerful part of the contextual toolset.”
You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Tracking cookies have been a key part of ad targeting for decades, but fewer makers of web browsers are supporting the technology. Contextual advertising makes sense in that marketers want to reach consumers who express their interest in a product by seeking related content.
“Sometimes we try to push away content because we were so focused on targeting individuals at that cookie level,” Joshua Palau, chief media and activation officer at Omnicom’s PHD, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The construct of reading a piece of content that you’re interested in and then seeing a product that’s related to that content does still hold true in the way that consumers look at products.”
Advertisers have a wide variety of data signals that help to determine how to reach target consumers and measure the effectiveness of their media spending. Privacy-compliant data sets and identity graphs based on location, demographics, purchase history and search histories are an important resource.
“You can still be effective, efficient and look at performance,” Palau said. “You could also be aligned with content that lines up with your brand values.”
Connected TV (CTV), which has always been cookieless, provides marketers a way to target audiences with more personalized ads, while also avoiding wasteful spending on repetitive media placements.
“Another great thing about the connected piece is having those things in place so that you can minimize that waste piece and get more targeted in terms of that audience,” Palau said. “The way that you manage these things is starting to become a lot clearer. Contextual has a nice seat here in the TV world.”
You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>‘The content side of the equation has become a lot more important in the last few years,” Mike Henry, chief executive of contextual analytics firm OpenSlate, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “Three or four years ago, people were primarily thinking about identifying the user that they want to get in front of. Content become more important as the opportunity to individually target users became under threat with the deprecation of cookies and unique identifiers in phones.”
His company started with a focus on helping marketers to identify quality content for ad placements on video-sharing site YouTube. OpenSlate has expanded to other platforms including Facebook, TikTok and Twitter as advertisers seek consumers whose media appetite includes influencers and creators.
“The original idea remains the focus for the company, which is….advertising is going to run a lot more places in the future than it has in the past,” Henry said. “We started not with brand safety or suitability, but with quality – understanding that advertisers would try to compare the content that’s on a platform like YouTube with content that’s on television.”
Many major companies have been mindful of their broader responsibilities to society for years. However, the past couple of years of the coronavirus pandemic, protests against racism and growing awareness of fake news have pushed more advertisers to scrutinize the digital content they support. OpenSlate has been able to show that consumers are much more likely to pay attention to ads that are within content that’s relevant to them.
“Advertisers can’t just let algorithms determine where they’re going to run,” Henry said. “They need to be involved in the decision about where their ads are running and what content they’re supporting.”
OpenSlate plans to expand to more media outlets to help its clientele to better track the effectiveness of their cross-platform campaigns.
“Ultimately, our goals is to measure all ad-supported content with the same set of metrics,” Henry said.
You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>That’s especially true with TikTok, the social video platform that this year become the first non-Facebook mobile app to reach 3 billion downloads worldwide, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower. TikTok uses a variety of algorithms to identify videos that have the power to go viral, and to personalize the viewing experience for each of its users.
“The ads become part of that contextual experience,” Sandie Hawkins, general manager of North America, global business solutions, at social video platform TikTok, said in this interview with Beet.TV. “The same algorithm that is choosing the right content from a creator standpoint is the same algorithm that’s picking the ads for delivery.”
Brands that tend to be most successful on TikTok are quick to identify trends that engage its community, which consists not only of people who watch videos, but also create them. TikTok has made overnight celebrities of people whose videos went viral.
“We see that TikTok as a platform is about the community coming together, determining what they like and then rallying around it,” Hawkins said. “It’s really about what the democratization of culture is, and what content should be, and letting brands be a part of where culture is going.”
Because most of TikTok’s content consists of user-generated videos, brands are mindful that their messaging appears within a suitable context.
“Brands can get concerned around the brand-safety elements, and so, we’ve partnered with companies like OpenSlate to help brands be more comfortable with the content that we have on our feed, because that’s really where the magic is,” Hawkins said.
Influencers who create videos and build up a following are an important part of the TikTok experience, and offer brands the possibility for partnerships on campaigns. The company’s research has found that 63% of users said like it when brands show TikTok creators in their videos.
“We always try to make a point of having brands leverage creators when they’re putting together content,” Hawkins said.
You are watching “Reshaping Contextual Advertising,” a Beet.TV leadership series presented by OpenSlate. For more videos, please visit this page.
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