Two-thirds of US marketers have said they will be significantly increasing their spend in contextual advertising in 2023 as ‘it is a viable replacement for 3rd party cookies’. However, when polled, marketers state that being a viable replacement for the cookie is only the 4th most important rationale for buying contextual advertising, behind key criteria such as return on investment and ensuring that the topic is contextually aligned with their product.
It would appear the more you study the rationale behind the use of contextual advertising, the more complex the answer. This article is an attempt to untangle these complex topics and explain them as simply as possible!!
By definition, when the industry says ‘contextual’ that means the context of a website, page or article related to a topic. Similarly, the use of contextual advertising is to place your messaging in content that relates to your product or service. In short, a car advertisement next to automotive content or an advertisement for cruises next to travel content. Simple, right?
Well, it used to be.
Due to the depreciation of cookies and the strengthening of regulations, contextual signals have emerged as viable alternatives to third-party cookie-driven data in today’s rapidly evolving industry. This means that the context of the page serves as not only the primary source of contextual advertising but, more importantly, as a valuable foundation for building audiences through contextual signals.
Signals?
Signals are the building blocks of audiences. Since the dawn of targeted advertising, contextual signals have been an ingredient in the recipe of any interest based audience. Context of the page, time the content is being read, day of week… and so forth. The difference is that they have now become the dominant ingredient and as such, the future of audience based advertising – especially in the Open Web – is going to be primarily based upon the grouping and classification of these contextual signals.
The current challenge lies in the industry’s tendency to blur the lines between contextual advertising and audience targeting driven by contextual signals, resulting in confusion due to the overlapping nature of these two concepts.
So let’s clean it up.
At Teads, we specialize in all aspects of contextual. Years of direct publisher relationships have afforded us the opportunity to build some of the most comprehensive contextual solutions, primarily designed to offer advertisers scaled targeting, and publishers the ability to monetise their content. To help explain this, we need to take a step back and ignore – for a minute – the confusion caused by technology and regulatory changes, and focus on what marketing objective brands want to achieve with digital advertising.
Firstly, let’s talk about Contextual Targeting. At Teads we refer to this as ‘owning the moment’. When does it make sense to ensure you are maximizing your reach when a topic matches your advertising goal, regardless of the audience composition? This is ‘owning the moment of receptivity’. Think about it this way; if you were a tech brand, launching a series of new products throughout October (in the run up to the Holidays), it might serve your brand well to run advertisements across all relevant technology publishers and pages.
Now let’s talk about ‘owning a moment in time’. Teads Contextual Reachcast allows advertisers to buy a 100% block of all contexts in a condensed period of time. In this instance, you could own all of the contextual content during the SuperBowl or WorldCup final that related to Football, Soccer or Sports overall.
Lastly, we focus on Audience Targeting, where the objective is to ‘own the audience’ that matches your target audience segmentation with as much reach as possible.
This is where the importance of contextual signals becomes evident. At Teads, we take a truth set (or a training set) of known users ( 3rd party data, CRM audiences etc.) and use machine learning and AI to find groupings of contextual signals that match that original seed data, which is critical when up to 70% of inventory in the OpenWeb is absent of a 3rd party cookie.
So to wrap this up, let’s all simplify this conversation down to these three key elements and really focus on what we’re buying. Is it the moment or the audience? If we can successfully prioritize these aspects, we can move past the complexities of contextual relevance, regulatory compliance, and cookieless environments, and concentrate on what matters most to advertisers and marketers: achieving our marketing objectives and business goals.
James Colborn, Global VP, Data, Teads