Here’s how brands are winning consumer trust with contextual advertising

A ton of options are made available with just the click of a button – we truly live in a world where the 'customer is king.' Brands are consistently working on making improvements to deliver experiences that ensure their customers are happy and satisfied. All marketing efforts are focused on four essential factors that define a brand's success -

• Building customer trust 
• Not just capturing but retaining customer attention 
• Creating brand awareness 
• Ensuring brand relevance across touchpoints 

Advertising campaigns aim to keep customers hooked and turn them into brand loyalists. The benefits of ad campaigns are multifold – your customers turn into advocates for your brand. They bring in long-term business and help brands establish themselves in the ever-changing market. 

Transparency plays an integral role in building this customer trust. We live in an era where we walk and talk data. With digital advertising becoming a crucial part of marketing initiatives and brand identities, keeping customer data safe and secure is essential to winning customers. The uproar about data privacy and cookies has pushed Google to phase out third-party cookies by 2023. 

As 'The Socrates of San Francisco' Howard Luck Gossage once said, "Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it's an ad."

So, successful advertising strategies nail two crucial aspects – content and context. This is precisely what makes contextual advertising the most promising bet in the post cookie era. Contextual advertising can deliver on all the aspects integral to marketing and help brands build customer trust. 

How? Let's get exploring. 

A strategy sans cookies 

• 81% of consumers said the potential risks from data collection outweigh the benefits.
• 92% of Americans are concerned about their privacy when using the Internet. 
• 79% of Americans are concerned about how their data is being used. 

These statistics make it reasonably clear – the fight for data privacy has never been more fierce. Consumers are more conscious about their data today than ever before. This makes transparency and data privacy the absolute need of the hour for brands to help them build customer trust the right way. Contextual advertising enables this as it helps advertisers and publishers create successful campaigns without leveraging any third-party cookies. Unlike behavioral ads that invade consumer privacy, contextual ads leverage artificial intelligence to target the right audiences and render ads on relevant websites without the use of cookies. 

Not only does it guarantee data privacy, but contextual intelligence also helps kick things up a couple of more notches by enabling personalization. With its capability to build contextual/personalized segments at scale, beyond the standard IAB taxonomy, contextual advertising boosts impression shares by delivering ads at a highly granular level. 

• Creates a lasting impression

Contextual advertising analyzes consumer interests and the content and context of a page with human-like precision using its AI and ML capabilities. It also ensures that the ads blend in with their surroundings, offering a non-intrusive browsing experience for consumers. Key factors that make contextual ads work and create an impression are relevance and sentiment analysis. 

Since they are displayed alongside relevant content, they have the ability to connect better with users as they speak more directly and personally. With contextual AI, advertisers can also leverage contextual creatives like images and videos that resonate with consumers. Contextual advertising offers various options like in-image, in-video, and in-article, allowing brands to explore different content forms and engage better with consumers. 

• Offers the highest levels of brand safety and suitability 

Safeguarding the brand's safety and suitability is vital for marketers and advertisers. Ads must reflect the brand's identity and values. Contextual AI's ability to analyze both the written and visual content of a page gives advertisers an environment where their values and ideas fit seamlessly. It can also understand nuances in language and semantically interpret editorial content. A better understanding of the audience, tailored messaging, and ads displayed in an ideal environment – contextual advertising ensures the highest levels of brand safety and suitability.

Ads rendered alongside negative or harmful content can drastically impact a brand's reputation and favorability. Our recent research co-conducted with Metrixlab revealed that placing ads on negative content like plagiarized content, false or harmful articles, or negative reviews can drop brand favorability by 10%! With contextual, advertisers can safely evade serving ads on webpages that host any harmful content as it complies with the GARM Brand Safety and Suitability framework. 

• The attention economy 

With an ocean of content and ads floating in the digital world, advertisers face another challenge. How do they attract, engage, and pique the interest of customers such that they can not just capture, but retain their attention? Also, how do advertisers calculate ROI on their marketing spend?

On average, people are exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements a day. Contextual ads can go a long way in helping brands break through this clutter as they are more relevant to the consumer’s line of interest and align with the messaging they have already been consuming on the page. 

A study we conducted along with Lumen Research revealed that:

• Contextual ads attracted much greater attention than the other, more traditional formats. 
• The attention span for users across social media platforms was 37% higher for the contextual ads than any of the video or display ads.
• Contextual ads drove 3x more engagement than the traditional formats.

Contextual ads consider three integral factors – context, creativity, and placement. Ads that deliver relevant messaging are truly valuable and impactful and do not hamper the customer’s browsing experience. Beyond just impressions or click numbers, contextual has the ability to measure attention as a KPI, helping brands realize how consumers really feel about the ads. 

What makes contextual advertising a global favorite today? The reasons are plenty. Its creativity, contextual relevance, personalization capabilities, and more, all without using any third-party cookies. A strategy that's respectful of consumer privacy and provides a safe, non-intrusive, and relevant browsing experience – winning customer trust has never looked easier. From analyzing content and context to user sentiment and interests, contextual caters to all the pressing needs of advertisers and customers alike, making it the preferred alternative globally.