“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.
]]>But that shouldn’t be the case when it comes to advertising against news.
Interpublic’s UM Worldwide has become the latest agency in a procession of industry players to counsel advertisers against blacklisting news publishers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, UM’s chief digital and innovation officer Joshua Lowcock explains: “News is absolutely, categorically a brand-safe environment to be. There is no reason to avoid news and say that it’s not brand-suitable.
“The notion that you should somehow avoid negative news is, I think, a dangerous path to play because … it’s a slippery slope and you can’t ever win that debate. What’s negative to one person might not be negative to another.
“In the research that we’ve done, no one blames a brand for COVID-19 or coronavirus or a negative news event.”
From the early stages of the pandemic, many advertising buyers began using “brand safety” tools in ad-buying platforms to swerve ad opportunities against coronavirus-related content, or simply stopped advertising in news altogether.
That comes as publishers struggle to cope with a large-scale advertising drop-off that has pushed many farther to the brink of survival.
Even as the likes of Comscore launched an “epidemic brand safety filter” to help advertisers dodge types of virus news, IAB president David Cohen published an IAB article, How Brands and Agencies Can Save American Lives in The Coronavirus Crisis, urging an end to the practice.
Publishers’ group Digital Content Next also wrote a letter to marketers and ad verification companies asking them to exempt premium, trusted media companies from COVID-19 brand safety filters.
For UM Worldwide’s Lowcock, when it comes to ad inventory, there is a difference between “brand safety” and “brand suitability”.
“I think brand safety is well-defined … it’s advertising or sponsoring content that encourages hate, violence or misinformation,” he explains.
“I think (brand) suitability is less well-defined. The industry needs to evolve a little bit and stop seeing brand suitability as yet another avoidance strategy.
“If you’re marketing or advertising a certain product or service and it’s not empathetic to the environment that you’re in, that’s really the brand suitability crux or nexus of the issue that you need to resolve and that’s what’s come to light in this present time that we’re in.”
Results of a survey published recently by Utzschneider’s IAS show:
So Lowcock is amongst the agency executives urging advertisers – stay in news, but recalibrate your messaging.
“If anything, the learning from this moment, regardless of advertising category is, be appropriate with your messaging and have the right creative that is appropriate to the times and the environment.
“Make sure that your creative is right and your creative is empathetic and sensitive, then it will be more than likely be brand-suitable.”
Lowcock thinks smart tagging of the real meaning of content can help the industry get there.
“Where we hope tools will go is beyond being blunt-force objects and more so contextual and sentiment analysis because that’s where you can actually be much more intelligent and misconstruing what a word means and the actual context would go away.
“So you’d take a word like ‘shooting’ – from shooting a goal to shooting a human being, you actually know what the differential is between them and go, ‘Okay, one is a good place to be. It’s safe to be. The other one, I need to know a bit more detail or adjust my messaging if I’m going to be in that environment’.”
Production Note: The backdrop in this video is an image of the UM conference room. This video was produced remotely at Joshua’s home.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
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