Do you really know what you get from contextual targeting?
When you step away from the creative, the marketing, and the pretty pictures that we use in ad tech, the services that our industry delivers are rather homogenous. I work with some of the world’s most incredible people with remarkable insights, yet I often like looking at the things I do from a 30,000-foot point of view. How much different does the technology that Verve delivers differ from our peers? We all talk about privacy and value transparency in one form or another. We all talk about business outcomes and value-add in one form or another. And for those that provide contextual targeting, we talk about how our technology and platform delivers a brand’s content at the point when media, data, and technology come together. When I fly down to the granularity of our business to look at how Verve truly differentiates itself, the proof is in the pudding. There is a ton of substance beyond the style — and most importantly, there is truth and trust to be found in what we do. It’s not enough for us to tout differences… Like any finely tuned machine, Verve has been conducting different exercises to validate where and how it holds competitive advantage. One piece of technology that I have tremendous interest in is Moments.AI™, Verve’s contextual targeting solution. While contextual targeting is not a new advertising construct, it has received a lot of new interest with third-party cookie depreciation looming on the horizon. We asked ourselves a rather simple question: How much better is our contextual solution than those of our competitors? Better yet, we also asked TPA Labs to help us independently answer the question and verify our claims that we hold some advantage over industry peers. Verve went to TPA Labs claiming that Moments.AI™ can contextually target content on the open web on the same day as the content is published. We have been able to show how this could enable advertisers to advertise alongside highly relevant new content while it was attracting large audiences. Now, we wanted someone else to say it for us, independently of our point of view or position. TPA conducted a 24-hour campaign targeting new sports-related content in the UK and Germany. Running the campaign for 24 hours on a Saturday during the football season meant there would be lots of relevant content published, and provided a clear timeframe within which the content had to be published. To measure the success of Moments.AI™, we would determine the percentage of impressions that were served on URLs published on the Saturday, and compare it against the same metric of the two alternative vendors. …unless others can tout them with us. Thankfully, TPA Digital independently verified that Verve’s contextual ad targeting is more accurate at targeting new and relevant content than leading alternatives. Put another way, nearly 45% of impressions delivered as part of this test were wasted. Verve was able to show its efficiency by reducing waste and delivering stronger impact and ROI. Not only were we wowed, but we also got to wondering how many contextually-targeted programmatic advertising campaigns fail to deliver against their most basic objectives. If I am an agency planner, strategist or brand manager, I would want to know the validity of any associated ad spend. The TPA Digital test proves that if brands want to better connect with consumers through contextually-relevant advertising, they must commit to working more closely with partners to earn full value from technologies available to them. I invite you to learn more about the research and explore our findings. The industry has seen the power of contextual targeting, but Verve wants to wield that power in more exciting ways, all for client benefits. The best part of contextual targeting is how it helps capture the meaningful moments that matter to brands and customers. When we are successful doing that, everyone wins faster. Ask us how we do it — and do it well.
Brand safety and suitability in a privacy-first world
As the digital landscape transforms around new privacy regulations and platform restrictions, the marketing industry is transitioning away from a single-minded focus on audience tracking and placing deeper emphasis on contextual marketing. But at the same time, the industry knows it can’t afford to take a step back in certain areas where great progress has been made, especially as it relates to brand safety and suitability in digital advertising. How can marketers ensure brand safety and suitability in a contextually driven marketing landscape? Let’s take a look at some of the advances that have laid a foundation for privacy-safe success. The brand safety and suitability imperative First, we need to think about what brand safety and brand suitability means in the context of the modern marketing landscape? In simple terms: At their respective cores, brand safety and brand suitability are all about ensuring that you’re connecting with the right audiences at the right time and place with a relevant message, while protecting a brand’s reputation. In a privacy-first world, this is more important than ever, as stringent brand safety and suitability standards foster trust between brands and consumers and ensure a brand’s ads appear next to content that is safe, trustworthy, and accurate. Brand safety and suitability are clearly top-of-mind on many fronts these days. For example, consider Disney’s recent announcement that the forthcoming ad-supported version of Disney+ will refrain from running ads on shows that cater to young children, and will not collect data on kids who use the service. We’re also seeing this issue arise with more “grown-up” issues; our team has seen a number of brands look to safeguard themselves from appearing around political messages and hot-button news items that can cause friction. Contextual advertising in a brand-safe, brand-suitable way So if you have made this far into this blog post, you may be asking yourself, “How can brand safety and suitability concerns be addressed as ad-tech continues to evolve?” Enter contextual advertising, where content is analyzed and categorized based on keywords, meta tags, content semantics, along with other criteria. Done right, modern contextual marketing moves beyond basic blocklists to analyze the entire piece of content appearing at a URL, thus more effectively protecting a brand’s reputation. Contextual marketing represents the foundation of a strong go-forward marketing strategy, and the industry is rising to meet the needs of marketers in this regard. Verve’s Moments.AI represents a first-of-its-kind, real-time contextual targeting solution for brands in North America. With Moments.AI, content is analyzed and broken down by multiple dimensions to allow for precise and accurate audience targeting. Brands can access newly published content instantly based on visual content and sentiment analysis, keywords, semantics, and meta tags—all within milliseconds, and all within a brand-safe, brand-suitable and highly targeted way. Moments.AI fully supports Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) framework, ensuring this solution is scalable through standardization. The best part of contextual platforms is that ads are becoming more measurable. Only with access to metrics that define the quality of the environment can advertisers truly maximize their content. With our new Visual Intent solution, which combines Getty Images’ resources with Verve’s Moments.AI, marketers can target relevant, brand-safe content in real time with advertising placed adjacent to visual content from Getty Images. Contextual marketing has historically posed an inherent brand suitability problem, as the industry aggressively homes in on keywords and topics to reach their desired consumers. However, challenges of the past don’t have to hold back contextual marketing of the future. Here at Verve, we’re reinventing contextual marketing for the modern privacy-first landscape. If you’d like to learn more, get in touch with us.
