Contextual advertising has been around since the early days of the internet. But it got overlooked by the more personalized and sophisticated behavior-based ads. It has now made a comeback again due to various factors, like the phasing out of third-party cookies, customers’ demand for better data privacy rules, and the blurring lines between personalization and creepiness.
As governments, brands, technology platforms, and customers struggle to balance personalization and privacy, contextual ads have become the natural choice to replace behavior-based ads.
Although Google has temporarily slowed down the third-party cookies’ phasing out process, brands have already started using contextual advertising to create brand awareness and sell products. The global contextual advertising market will likely generate a revenue of $210 billion in 2023.
With the growing prominence of contextual advertising, it’s time brands understand the trends and predictions and use them to unlock their full potential.
Predictions and Trends in Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising has become more advanced, intelligent, and sophisticated than in the early days. Here are some trends and predictions from experts that can help brands in building successful contextual ad campaigns.
1. AI-driven Personalization
The success of behavior-based ads was linked to personalization. Contextual ads were relevant to content but never directly spoke to customers. All that is set to change with artificial intelligence (AI), as it will bring personalization to contextual ads.
Since AI is trained using large data sets, it can identify the patterns in content, analyze the editorial pages and the entire content across different countries and languages, and use those insights to create customized campaigns and contextually relevant personalized ads. It helps brands understand the context of the content and customers in real-time and enables publishers to display ads that serve the customers’ interests.
For example, a luxury car manufacturer could use AI to understand their target customers’ likes and interests without peering into third-party cookies, create custom segments, analyze the trending websites and topics relevant to those interest areas, and display the relevant ads.
2. Ads for Connected TV
According to an IAB report, connected TV (CTV) is growing rapidly compared to traditional TV. Over half of the brands shifted their budgets from broadcast and cable TV towards CTV during the pandemic. As CTV receives more targeted data, brands are considering using it for contextual advertising.
They leverage technologies like programmatic advertising and data like viewers’ likes, preferences, and locations to display ads that resonate with them. It is an exciting and new opportunity for brands to explore different ways of advertising and engaging with customers.
3. Video Contextual Ads
Contextual ads can potentially change how ads are displayed in videos. As viewers, we are accustomed to watching intrusive and non-relevant ads in the middle of an interesting video. They don’t serve the customers’ interests and could lead to unnecessary expenditure.
According to Daniel Reina, the CEO of Tappx, technology will play a huge role in video advertising. Instead of distributing irrelevant ads at a fixed time, technologies like AI can identify phrases, dialogues, and scenes in the videos relevant to each brand and seamlessly integrate contextual ads into the video to create a non-intrusive experience for customers.
For example, a fitness brand could display its products as sponsored products in relevant fitness videos. This approach will be more cost-effective and could improve customer engagement and conversions.
4. Contextual Ads in Social Media
Social media platforms are filled with ads based on customers’ online behavior and browsing patterns. However, these ads are creepy, intrusive, and primarily based on customers’ past behavior. Contextual ads, on the contrary, are non-intrusive and focus more on the current context and interests of the customers.
Brands can use AI and programmatic advertising platforms to analyze the topics and pages the customers follow and engage and understand their preferences and interests. They can use these insights to display ads relevant to the context and customers’ interests. If we go back to the fitness brand example again, the brand will target the users who frequently engage with posts on fitness and nutrition to display their product ads.
As third-party cookies phase out and customers place more importance on data privacy, contextual ads will be an ideal alternative to behavior-based ads on social media platforms.
How To Get Started?
There’s no doubt that contextual advertising is the future of marketing. While there was initial skepticism about its effectiveness, brands understand its value in the privacy-first era and are gradually embracing it. Statista predicts contextual advertising spending will amount to $376.2 billion by 2027. That’s almost double the spending of 2021.
The new form of contextual advertising is more data and technology-driven. AI and programmatic advertising will play a crucial role. Hence, brands using contextual advertising must leverage these technologies to improve targeting.
At Aroscop, we have built a future-ready programmatic advertising platform to help brands achieve maximum ROI from campaigns with minimal effort. From contextual targeting to delivering contextually relevant messages to customers at the right time, our programmatic platform plays a significant role in helping brands seamlessly transition into the improved world of contextual advertising.
To know more about our solutions, contact us.
