Contextual Data In Advertising

Video Transcript: Contextual Data In Advertising

Hey everyone, welcome to another video about digital advertising. My name is Robert Brill. I am the Chief Executive Officer for Brill Media.

And today we're talking about contextual targeting and advertising. So what is contextual targeting? Contextual targeting is the use of keywords on a page or a website and listings of websites to make a determination about where to serve ads.

So there are three overall things that are happening in contextual targeting in 2020. Number one, it's syndicated or pre-selected or pre-made contextual targeting data elements. So the idea here is if I want to target people who are interested in Major League Baseball, there are multiple segments that are just pre-made for me to target Major League Baseball.

But let's say I'm in Los Angeles and I don't want to target just anyone on a page about Major League Baseball. And I'll actually take a step back. The core element here is when a page loads on a website, CNN, Yahoo, Fox, Flickster, any mom blog you might be interested in, any recipe blog, like any page with words on it, there is an assessment of the meaning or the context of the page.

So is it talking about cars? Is it talking about a specific model of cars? Is it talking about a brand of cars?

What is this page about? That's the question that's being answered with contextual targeting. And then we can serve ads on specific pages that have a specific relevancy in topics.

So, for example, if I'm an advertiser that wants to associate with Major League Baseball, I can serve ads to the contextual target for baseball. And any time any of the teams are mentioned, any of the key phrases around baseball, such as umpire and strikeouts and home run, various stadium names, any of those elements are mentioned in a way that leads the contextual targeting data provider to make a determination that the page is about baseball, an ad can be served in that targeting scenario. So now, let's say I don't want to target people who are interested in baseball.

I want to target people who are interested in the Los Angeles Dodgers. So then maybe there is no existing syndicated data segment targeting the Los Angeles Dodgers. So I can go into a tool and identify 100 different keywords that are all related to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So anytime any of the following keywords appear on a page and the contextual data provider makes a determination that the page is about the Los Angeles Dodgers, the ad can be served. So the keywords would be Los Angeles Dodgers, Dodgers, Dodger Stadium, Clayton Kershaw, Tommy Lasorda, Chavez Ravine. I can't think of any of the players' names.

I've been to a lot of games last year and I can't think of any of the names. It's amazing. The point is any of those keywords appear on a page, now we know this is not just about baseball.

This is actually about the Los Angeles Dodgers. And that's when I make a decision to serve an ad on a page about the Los Angeles Dodgers. So contextual targeting has probably been on 80% of the advertising campaigns I've run in the last eight years, like just by volume of campaigns, because it's ubiquitous in the marketplace.

This is critical to understand. It's super valuable. Another part of contextual targeting is simply serving ads on a list of media properties that are relevant to the environment that we want to target.

So, for example, if I'm a restaurant advertiser and I want to reach the community of influencers around food in Los Angeles, I would make a list of all the websites, however small they might be, who are talking about Los Angeles food. So, like eating around L.A., follow my gut, dude let's eat L.A., which happens to be my property, which I haven't updated in like three years. But the point is, any site that runs ads that is talking about a specific topic, I can serve ads on a whitelist.

And that is super powerful, right? You create your custom ad network for ad targeting based on a topic or an idea or something very specific to an advertiser. And then finally, it's URL targeting.

Let's say I don't want to leave it up to keywords to make a decision about where to serve an ad. Let's say there are 10 articles that I can serve in that are particularly relevant to me as an advertiser. I can simply upload those 10 URLs and serve ads whenever someone goes to those URLs.

Those 10 pages on the web, a lot of traffic or a little traffic, the ads will only run on those pages. So, to recap, contextual targeting is about using syndicated data segments to make a decision about where to serve an ad based on the content of the page, the context, the keywords that are being used on the page. I can do that for custom keywords.

And I can make a whitelist of sites or apps that I want to serve ads on. And then finally, I can make a whitelist of specific URLs, long URLs, article pages, et cetera, where I want to serve ads. That is contextual targeting in 2020.

One additional note. We just are releasing. We just released a blog post about contextual targeting.

I'll link to it below. And it goes into a lot more detail about how contextual targeting works with some robust examples of the companies that are deploying contextual targeting, the tools that we use to make contextual targeting work. So, click the link below and you'll see that as well.

Talk to you guys soon.