CMO asks the experts about what digital marketing will hold in 2020
Contextual advertising experiences a renaissance
GumGum SVP of global commercial development, Adam Schenkel, said contextual advertising, the centuries old way of reaching relevant audiences by placing an ad next to brand or product related content, is set for a renaissance next year, boosted by technological advances in sentiment analysis.
“The shift towards mobile advertising has strangled the effectiveness of the cookie which, along with GDPR, has led to consumer data privacy concerns and a renewed focus on user experience. This means brands are seeking alternate methods of targeting consumers,” he said.
“Contextual advertising is now highly sophisticated thanks to the use of AI-driven natural language processing [NLP] sentiment analysis across both image and text. This has the potential to open up highly valuable inventory and drive real advertising ROI for brands, while delivering a positive user experience for consumers.”
Integral Ad Science managing director for APAC, Stephen Dolan, also saw contextual targeting returning to the forefront of media planning in 2020.
“Contextual adjacencies are top of mind for both marketers and content publishers. Now more than ever, having a detailed and accurate understanding of a Web page’s content both opens-up inventory for publishers and allows marketers to be relevant to their audiences,” he said. “The claims are supported by plenty of evidence such as Biometric research conducted by Integral Ad Science and Neuro-Insight, which show people respond to the entire context surrounding an ad impression rather than just a single component of it.”
As a result, the conversation will further evolve from what Dolan described as a “black and white binary focus of brand safety” to more nuanced and bespoke brand suitability.
“In today’s digital landscape, we are scaling successfully through the likes of programmatic – now we need to focus on quality. The first goal will always be safety, but the close second should be to appear in a brand-safe environment at scale and in a suitable context and digital advertising in 2020 will see more traction towards this move,” he said.
This excerpt was first seen on CMO’s ‘Predictions: 9 digital marketing predictions for 2020’ article. Interested to learn more about contextual targeting? Speak with us today!