Contextual Advertising

Contextual Advertising: New Opportunity?

 

Contextual advertising has emerged as a new trend for effective digital advertising in the face of increasing privacy restrictions. Increasing privacy restrictions are limiting the ability for advertisers to personalize the digital advertising efforts using an individual’s traffic and data. Contextual advertising “targets potential customers by relying on context such as the content of a webpage, location or weather,” per IBM’s Watson Advertising product offering. While one can appreciate the creative response to the severe shift in the digital marketing space, the approach feels more familiar than not. Creating relevancy in advertisements to the topic of the page or search feels similar to original sales motions of cross-selling products and services. Given advances in machine learning and access to external data sources, advertisers will be able to leverage time, recent events, weather, etc. to increase the complexity and ideally the outcome of the marketing. Nonetheless, losing the personalization of the recent decade will continue to be a dramatic hurdle for the industry to overcome. Contextual advertising is likely to be the tool of the new era of digital marketing in its attempt to address the new gap in access to personal data. It will be interesting to see this field evolve as marketers tap into the shrinking sources of behavioral data and build new sources of contextual data to fill in the margins. 

Sources: 

https://www.ibm.com/watson-advertising/thought-leadership/what-is-contextual-advertising