Contextual Advertising: How Granular Should You Get? Spoiler Alert… Very

From the dawn of the digital advertising industry, marketers have continually searched for the perfect targeting strategy; one that hits all the right notes, is able to scale, and of course, nails monthly and year-end performance goals. Since the primary purpose of advertising is to find and connect with an audience, it is vital to use the right tools combined with viable strategies to execute our campaigns. As the title suggests, it is worthwhile to spend some time exploring this from a contextual targeting perspective.

When targeting context, numerous factors need to be taken into account. Advertisers must be alert to a host of variables, including, 

mislabelled segments & misaligned audiences, and unsuitable brand content, which leads to inefficient buying, optimization and also sub-par blocking tactics. The list goes on. 

The last point, which could be the most frustrating of all, has plagued marketers and their campaigns for decades.

Let’s look at an example: Your new client, selling cookware sports equipment, wants to target popular personalities from the sports/entertainment world influencers on YouTube. However, after a day you find a few videos from various channels using “overly salty” language, which results in blocking entire channels to remove it from your campaign. This means that you are missing out on the other, highly desired, brand-safe, content. Not to mention hurting the scale of the campaign. This example can be applied within other massive categories, like News/ entertainment, as well, where an entire channel may be blocked in order to avoid putting ads next to stories that contain violence, controversial politics or contentious world conflicts. With the sheer magnitude of the scale of a platform like YouTube (2B monthly active users, 1B hours of content watched daily, and 500 hours of content uploaded per minute), there would be no feasible way to sift through and manage the content effectively.

The right solution should detect which videos are contextually relevant and give the marketer the right type of granular control, to identify exactly which videos they want in their campaign, and which they do not. This type of heavy lifting needs to be proficient, speedy and effective.

Having this capability will improve a marketer’s ability to be nimble, deliberate, and confident in their approach to supply, so targeting is focused on the right supply, while non-brand safe supply is easily identified and blocked.

When we launched GP’s advanced contextual video intelligence platform, we built it with video ID level controls in mind, instead of channel ID. This provides marketers with tools to take a more surgical approach to their targeting and blocking strategies, potentially precluding the need for blunt blocking scenarios, which have been logistically necessary for many campaigns, regardless of the platforms they are bought through.

One of our goals is to streamline the process for marketers, making it easy for them to cut through the noise, target (and block) what’s needed, and increase their ability to deliver against their KPIs, including bounce rates, time spent on the page, and total pages consumed.

To hear about more benefits to buying at the video ID level vs the channel ID please get in touch with us today to learn more!