How brands are reigniting interest in advertising with contextual targeting

Paul Thompson, UK country manager, Seedtag

Concerns about online privacy, intrusiveness and irrelevant ads are driving consumer antipathy toward advertising as an industry. As a result, marketing teams face the increasingly difficult challenge of changing perceptions of their brand and ensuring that advertising as a whole is seen as a force for good.

There is a prime opportunity for brands to innovate and reinvigorate their marketing strategies to more effectively engage consumers and ensure they build positive feelings for their brand. Seizing the opportunity starts with building trust and doing away with annoying and wasteful intrusiveness, replacing it with something of value and a fair exchange for a consumer’s hard-won attention.

However, this is much harder to achieve if ad content and brand values are not aligned with the hosting platform. Contextual advertising has the potential to help marketers overcome these challenges, delivering results just as effectively as hyper-targeting while at the same time promoting privacy, transparency and supporting high-quality content.

Context is crucial

Given its ability to target the right audience without cookies or the collection of personal data, contextual advertising is future-proofed against the radical privacy changes that have already been made by Apple and are soon to be implemented by Google.

Contextual AI analyzes the visual and written content of a page, ensuring that ads are placed in an environment whose content and ideas align perfectly with the reader’s interests.

Seedtag conducted research with Nielsen to analyze whether consumers are more receptive to ads embedded in the content in which they are already immersed.

The study involved 1,800 UK participants surveyed across three categories; automotive, food and drink and beauty. The consumers were divided into four groups based on different targeting approaches within the industry: no targeting, interest-based, demographic-based and contextual.

In most cases, contextual targeting outperformed the other categories throughout the study, demonstrating its effectiveness as a way for brands to create positive associations with high-quality content while building valuable trust with their consumers.

Generating interest and attention

Even at the dawn of the modern era of mobile screens and always-on content, estimates suggested that consumers were already being exposed to thousands of ads every day. Furthermore, Nielsen research in recent years shows that consumers’ memory of an ad can vanish overnight, meaning it’s harder than ever for marketers to generate attention and sustain interest for their brands.

Adopting a contextual advertising strategy is one tactic to overcome the challenge of standing out and being remembered. Nielsen and Seedtag showed that contextual targeting was the most effective method in generating interest across all three categories and was 32% more effective than demographic targeting.

Previous research has also shown how effective generating interest and attention can be for driving increased sales. A study conducted by Lumen into the effectiveness of various ad formats in retaining attention found that the longer an ad was in view, the more likely it was to lead to a sale. Contextual ads held viewers’ attention the longest and drove 3.3x more attention than the IAB’s other standard formats.