ALL ABOUT: CONTEXTUAL ADVERTISING
Contextual advertising is multichannel and scalable, making it a reliable means for reaching audiences. Nowadays, contextual advertising leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), which has made this specific targeting method more effective than ever before.
Overall, contextual understanding – across display, mobile, video, DOOH or other formats – enables targeting ad inventory that is relevant to the content or environment being consumed.
According to research conducted by IAS (Integral Ad Science), almost two-thirds (65%) of UK consumers have a more favourable opinion of the brands that serve them contextually relevant ads. Additionally, more than eight in ten (81%) prefer to see ads that align with the content they are consuming.
Contextual targeting involves advertisers placing their ads based on this all important relevance to the content of a web page, or as an audience proxy and the key difference between contextual and behavioural advertising is that behavioural targeting aims to ensure the ad is relevant to the user, leveraging cookies to target based on a user’s past actions. Contextual advertising however, targets based on the content of the page on which the advertisement appears, targeting a user based on content they are actively consuming.
It offers increased capabilities for localisation, and with technologies being sophisticated enough to control how a message is presented in various contexts, advertisers now have far greater agility when it comes to planning and executing their campaigns.
It delivers unique benefits which make it a particularly effective strategy for campaign planning. For example, it gives marketers an opportunity to target niche contexts. Marketers can choose to target by a general topic, or use a collection of keywords for more precise targeting. And, since contextual advertising campaigns are served programmatically, metrics can be reviewed in real-time and optimized for maximum performance.
With a contextual campaign, products and services in sensitive categories can drive awareness using in-context and out-of-context phrases. AI search engine technology enables a marketer to identify the phrases and keywords that are most appropriate to target. By doing this, a marketer can eliminate phrases within the campaign targeting methodology, ensuring the ads reach the right audience. Another strategy is to widen the contexts targeted to reach new, broader audiences. This enables marketers to experiment with targeting a wider audience, to find what really works.
Looking ahead, with UK marketing budgets increasing for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, now is the time for brands to tap into the power of emotion and semantics to deliver contextually relevant ads. This will be vital to develop long-term consumer relationships and drive competitive advantage.