Though it has received an increasing amount of press of late, contextual targeting is hardly a new concept. The idea of finding consumers by looking at what they’re reading or viewing dates back, well, to the earliest days of advertising.

But in recent years, contextual targeting has taken a back seat to audience targeting as methods such as third-party cookies have given advertisers a taste for focusing on individual consumers. At the root of this approach, as Jessica Leong, senior director of Technical Operations at 4D, Silverbullet’s Context Outcomes Engine, describes it, was a relentless focus on performance with “only very specific KPIs such as CPA (cost per activation) and ROAS (return on ad spend) in the mix.” More upper funnel and awareness strategies like contextual, she says, tended to “fall by the wayside.”

But now, with the crumbling of third-party cookies—and the search for something to replace them—Leong notes that “people are scrambling to fill those audience-targeting capabilities that rely on user data with a substitute that either performs better or at least on par with audience targeting.” In the process, she says, these advertisers have rediscovered contextual, finding that it is, in fact, performance based. “If you’re finding someone while they’re in a contextually relevant environment,” she says, “they may be more likely to purchase or subscribe.” This understanding, she suggests, is even more pronounced with “more sophisticated measurement strategies that use multi-touch attribution models and weight their value throughout the conversion funnel.”

The Advantage ofScalability

Leong notes that when she first became a trader, she immediately saw some key advantages to the contextual approach, despite the industry’s fascination with audience targeting. “I began to feel that audience targeting was very, very specific and too narrow,” she says. “It was also more expensive than contextual.” An additional problem, she notes, was that “you had a specific target of a person based on their profile, but you had no visibility into the methodology behind that profile.” Contextual, she says, “made a lot of sense because it allowed you to find people who you know for sure are interested in your brand or product because they’re on relevant websites.” And importantly, because it wasn’t so granular, “it was scalable.”

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Contextual allows "you to find people who you know for sure are interested in your brand or product because they're on relevant websites.""

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It's the lack of scalability, Leong believes, that has always been an issue when it comes to KPIs. “Whenever you’re trading,” she explains “what you’re trying to find is the most targeted solution that also allows you to scale and deliver on the campaign.” For Leong, contextual “satisfied both aspects of that.” The point is that “if someone is watching a video or reading an article about a certain topic, they’re probably interested in that topic, so you can go ahead and serve them an ad that is relevant to their interests.” In contrast, using audience segments, “someone could be, for example, a dog parent, but not in the market at that exact moment for dog food.” What’s missing is flexibility, she says, the ability to “follow people based on their interests versus who you’ve pigeonholed them into being.”

Presenting a Package of Inventory

Behind this change in mindset, Leong contests, is understanding that while the audience segment is a group of people, the contextual segment is a package of inventory. It is intent-based and depends on where the user is or the media they’re viewing, rather than just their previous behavior. The point, she, explains, is that “just because you’ve classified a person a certain way doesn’t mean that they’re going to act that way throughout the time they’re on the internet.” There’s a synergy, she says, behind someone who’s looking at an article on a specific topic and then seeing an ad on that topic. “You know it’s top of mind for them. It’s something that they’re interested in and actively engaging with.”

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In the process, you're getting more transparency into where you're placing your ads, as opposed to putting your faith in a "black box.""

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The contextual package of inventory is created when a service, such as 4D, combs webpages and videos to find and classify content based on specific predetermined topics. “If you think about it,” Leong notes, “this is very similar to how PMPs and publishers work. They would put together a package saying these are the URLs and/or formats and/or environments, depending on how granular or how large” a net you want to cast. “What you’re getting is where you’re going to run versus whom you’re going to target your ads to. By activating against an inventory source, you’re able to be more flexible in terms of the users you would then see.” And in the process, you’re getting more transparency into where you’re placing your ads, as opposed to putting your faith in a “black box.”

Trust the Technology

Logical as this approach might seem—especially in an era when the ability to target audiences is going away—some advertisers have been resistant, choosing to, as Leong puts it, “keep their guardrails in place, to make sure they don’t run into unsavory content or continue to push for lower funnel tactics driving performance.” But, while Leong concedes that those are “super reasonable considerations,” she also sees that as an unnecessary limit on “what certain companies are trying to prove in a quickly changing environment.” The key to the successful use of contextual targeting, she suggests, is learning to trust the technology, saying “to your vendors, ‘I’ll let you run with it as it is and trust the process to show me its value.’” And this approach, Leong believes, will soon be inevitable. “As contextual becomes more prevalent”—and she believes it will—operators including, for example, DSPs, “will be forced to incorporate better ways for media buyers to run contextual targeting strategies.”

In the next installment of this series, we’ll take a close look at the ways in which a heightened focus on contextual targeting is allowing brands to reassess their approach to brand safety, broadening both their reach and their impact.