How Context is Becoming the King?

Advertisers and marketers are already ahead in the game of contextual marketing, creating better ways to engage their visitors after hearing the news of the demise of third-party cookies. By using their first-party data combined with intellectual algorithms they predict interests and behavior. This provides the marketers with great opportunities for contextual targeting, better-sponsored content formats, and much more excellent cross-media analysis. Various brands are already taking advantage of these opportunities. According to a survey done by YouGov, almost half of all U.S. based brands rely on contextual targeting techniques, and nearly one-third of UK brands use it

How Contextual Targeting is Making a Comeback?

Didn’t contextual targeting vanish years ago, we heard you say? No, it didn’t really. Contextual targeting was, for a period of time, among the top dominant forms of digital advertising. The issue was that it was not very popular because its outcome was lower than advertising using third-party cookies. But talking about today, contextual advertising does not require third-party cookies, perhaps offering advertisers a great alternative to the problems they are facing with the demise of the third-party cookie. Targeting people can now be easily done with contextual targeting, thanks to its effectiveness and greater assurance that targeting people by content is a more privacy-friendly method. Ultimately, it’s a safe deal because context is king!

In the past, brand security had shown various challenges when it came to contextual advertising. We are sure you can remember both some embarrassing and funny misalignments that still scare various advertisers and give them sleepless nights. But nowadays there is no risk involved, with machine AI-powered technologies and learning offering a more clear understanding of content. Businesses are in a position where they can target different audiences, in a brand-safe environment, which also includes sentiment analysis. This clearly mitigates the downfalls around sensitive content that have the potential to cause problems to your brand.

What Are the Advantages of Contextual Targeting?

Apart from all the previous issues, context is king today and it is making a comeback, here are a some of its key advantages:

• New and greater advertising opportunities — innovative AI tools, such as computer vision, now make it convenient to understand the context of what users see on a website, which creates a variety of new advertising options and content formats on web pages that highlight a brand, product or topic through an image or video rather than text.
• Less thought work — With contextual advertising, you can convey marketing messages to users when you know they’re in a specific situation or state of mind, therefore taking much of the thought process out of advertising. This method gives brands an opportunity to engage with, receptive and specific target groups– ultimately leading to better accuracy and a greater return on investment.
• No ad fatigue — With the help of advanced AI-powered technologies, advertisers now have many convenient and effective ways to understand whether or not to put an advertisement next to a specific piece of content. This improves its accuracy to the users and therefore has a good effect on ad fatigue as the user sees advertising as a suitable place for them.
• Relevancy — As a marketer, you have the chance to enhance the ad experience with relevant and personalized ad creative and target users, who have become annoyed with non-relevant ad creatives, not based on the context of the site they are engaging with.

What Are Your Next Steps?

Contextual advertising should be the first choice for brands looking to engage closely with their customers with relevant and engaging content. It is true that there are a lot of advantages to contextual targeting and a lot of opportunities, but what should be your next steps?

As advertisers continue to innovate at a rapid pace, developing ways to target consumers and allow us to get even closer to our customers, contextual targeting will become even more valuable. Recent technology implies that contextual ads can be determined by user behavioral insights rather than human inference. eBay Advertising, for example, has recently created new cookie-less targeting methods, which bring together different audience segments based on contextual ads as well as key shopper signals — all created by eBay’s search algorithm. By mixing real-time and historical shopping behaviors, brands can deliver ads with greater accuracy and efficiency.

It is really important that you start taking steps to search for new partners for advertising, to include them in your marketing goals. You may find it quite interesting to hear that Google Adsense is no longer the toughest player in contextual advertising. Presently, various media buyers and DSPs do not depend on Google’s contextual catalog information and rather use the services of other contextual targeting companies. There are many other famous contextual targeting providers on the internet such as Mirrors by SilverPush, Media.net, ComScore, Simpli.fi, Oracle owned Grapeshot, Yahoo/Bing Ads, and Peer39.