What does 2022 hold for Contextual Advertising

2021 was a year of preparation, revelation, and a lot of soul searching for marketers. Preparation to retain consumer focus amidst falling attention span and increasing ad budget by brands. The revelation that growing data privacy concerns isn’t as bad as it sounds. It could just bring context and relevance back in the game and help advertisers and publishers leverage newer and improved forms of ad targeting. Finally, a lot of soul searching to sift through the myriad of advertising alternatives to gain a strong foothold in the cookie-less era in the not-so-distant future!

Come 2022 and all of this would gradually shape into a more meaningful approach and a new era in digital advertising. Here is our take on four key underlying themes of 2022 that would rule Contextual Advertising and make it a far worthier alternative for advertisers and publishers to reach out to their audience and capture their mind space.

• Data privacy will win and third-party cookies will lose: Data privacy and consent have become more important than ever. What started with GDPR’s stricter rules on protecting users’ privacy and rights, led to an evolution of sorts on how marketers collected and used data about their consumers. 

Leveraging zero-party and first-party data more, focusing on consumers’ intent rather than their browsing behavior, and building a personalized experience for users have helped brands to move away from earlier practices of behavioral targeting and following users with intrusive ads everywhere on the net. 

Advertisers and publishers now are also gradually moving away from third-party cookies – a move that not only alleviates consumers’ privacy concerns but also builds trust in brands that care about their users’ turn-offs. 

• Brand safety and Brand suitability to emerge as valid key concerns: Imagine you are a consumer of a brand because you love what it stands for and how it speaks to you. Suddenly, one day, you find its ads on a dubious site that’s not aligned with the brand’s values. Would you be surprised, question the brand’s decision to advertise on such an inappropriate site, lose your confidence in that brand or maybe move on to one of its competitors who now has your attention?

Now, as an advertiser, imagine this happening to even a certain percentage of your consumers. Would you be worried? Of course!

In fact, with the recent proliferation of social media and diverse online platforms into our lives, brand safety has emerged as one of the key concerns of advertisers. As per an IAB study, for around 77% of marketers stated brand safety as one of their key priorities.

It’s natural for brands to ensure practices that help them keep track of the platforms and networks where their ads are displayed since this has irrevocable long-term consequences in the form of losing your hard-earned consumer base and also negative word-of-mouth publicity. No brand can afford this! 

The seriousness and intent around making Brand safety and Brand suitability the front and center of advertising activities could be also gauged from the fact that GARM has come up with a Brand Safety Floor and Brand Suitability Framework for advertisers and publishers to refer to, for promoting brand suitability and creating experiences for brands and users that are relevant, suitable and safe. 

Brand suitability has been around for a while but it is only recently that advertisers have truly been able to embrace it as they can clearly see from their experience that Brand suitability bridges the divide between risk and opportunity and provides context-based protections for advertisers and also for the publisher.

• Context and relevance will become key to regaining consumer attention: Context affords you a deep understanding of how the content ecosystem is evolving, allowing you to see trends emerging that pose risks to your campaigns, and those that offer opportunities for you to engage with your prospective consumer.  This engagement is an important opportunity since it determines your brand recall and consequently has a significant impact on your consumer’s purchase intent.

With behavioral targeting no longer acceptable to most consumers, advertisers and publishers are finding it hard to retain user attention if they are not served a brand experience that’s aligned with their interests. With context, your understanding of content is deep, ensuring that you can prevent your campaigns from appearing near Illegal, unsafe, or inappropriate content. Hence, the supremacy of context and relevance!

Such a relevant awareness of brands not only ensures consumer attention but also boosts their trust level. A win-win situation for advertisers since they are able to target their audience in the right frame of mind, for publishers who build a loyal consumer base for providing relevant content and ad experience, and consumers for being able to discover brands organically and not forcefully.

• AI and ML will drive personalization with precision: Technology has been at the forefront of driving digital advertising. From introducing automation to enhance efficiency, we have now leaped forward to using AI and ML to predict user preferences and design tailor-made recommendations. Not just this, with machine learning techniques and AI, brands can now receive human-like understanding of any webpage, without the use of cookies.

This has important consequences for contextual advertising as well. Seedtag’s contextual AI has been instrumental in providing a human-like understanding of the content to deliver in-content placements with the highest precision of what would click with your user. Such personalized targeting creates a seamless user experience – one that captures user attention and enhances engagement with the brand.

2022 is going to be all about marketers trying to overhaul their strategies in the wake of developments in privacy regulations, changes in consumer preferences, leveraging AI/ML for delivering a human-like understanding of content and context amidst an ever reducing attention span.

Is your advertising at par with these dynamic developments? It’s time to go contextual in your approach and present your brand to an audience that’s interested and motivated to engage with you. With our Contextual AI technology, leverage the power of Machine Learning to capture your audience’s attention faster and for a longer period. Contact us today!