The context revival

Time to grow up? Online advertising is being described as something akin to a tearaway teenager that is waking up to the fact that everyone now expects it to become an adult.

Like a youth without the burden of responsibility it has been the subject of criticism over accountability and trust, with a perhaps unhealthy focus on short-termism.

However, as clients, trade bodies, legacy media and even governments call for a clean-up in the online space, the teenager is finally getting its act together.

Examples of this can be seen in the formation of The Coalition for Better Ads, the upcoming GDPR later this year, or the recent ads.txt initiative which is improving brand safety.

Yet another element of growing up is to learn from your elders – and in the case of online it is time to embrace one of the oldest rules of advertising: context.

Legacy media, particularly newspapers and magazines, have always traded on the power of context – essentially knowing the environment and therefore the frame of mind the consumer is likely to be in – but somehow it’s been forgotten in the online scramble which tends to chase ‘audiences’ no matter where they are.
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“We should never have lost sight of that in the first place,” says Claire Elsworth, innovation director at Initiative, who was speaking at a joint Mediatel and Seedtag debate examining intelligent digital ad strategies this week.

“I do hope, however, we’re now moving back towards this notion of delivering experiences that complement what the consumer is doing at that moment in time.”

To simply bombard consumers with ads – ignoring all context of experience or environment – is, Elsworth says, “quite an arrogant thing to do”.

“We need to invite people into our message, and context helps do that.”

Seedtag’s Jon Hewson, whose company delivers image-based contextual advertising for publishers, says that the online space is certainly maturing and this should improve the ad experience for consumers as well as the prospects for publishers.

“Online might be discovering ‘old rules,’” he says, “but at the end of the day this is all just common sense. But there is certainly a new breed of company that wants to deliver advertising that is contextual, relevant and more respectful. It’s a growth area.”

There is certainly a stronger indication from the biggest advertisers that something needs to change. P&G’s chief marketing officer, Marc Pritchard, kicked-off 2018 by saying he wants the online space to remove the “clutter”, with “less doing more”.

One publisher already doing that is The Daily Telegraph which recently overhauled its entire website.

“We’ve moved on from highly intrusive advertising that did nothing more than stop the reader from getting to the content,” explains Paul de la Nougerede, commercial product director at Telegraph Media Group. He says that commercial pressures have forced many publishers to try too hard to deliver too many ad formats in the vague hope of making money.

The only real impact was to see readers flock to install adblockers.

“We wanted a different approach,” de la Nougerede says. “We took out all the ads from our site and now there is just one single ad experience against a piece of content.

“Each advertiser is, effectively, now getting an exclusive, solos position.”

The Telegraph, following lengthy experimentation and consumer feedback, is now also delivering a “time-based” ad unit that refreshes every 15 seconds.

“Our research shows great feedback from consumers and improved [undisclosed, but double-digit] brand recall uplift,” de la Nougerede says.

None of this means, however, that the audience-first approach of online advertising is being cast aside or somehow downgraded.

“The two can and will co-exist,” says Mia Mulch, managing partner, operations, OMG UK Programmatic.

“At Omnicom, what we’re trying to do is start by defining and finding your audience first, then supplementing that with strategies linking in contextual environments.”

In recent years this has been helped, Mulch says, by re-writing the ‘off-the-shelf’ algorithms of technology partners and turning them into more intelligent and bespoke tools.

“On the buy-side we’ve done some re-wiring behind the scenes to help us customise what we use to make decisions,” she says, suggesting the tech needs a human touch to get the most from its performance.

However, for Elsworth, it’s not even about coexistence, or having to choose between ‘audience first’ or ‘context first’.

“It should just be ‘experience first’,” she says, adding that shifting to this mentality would improve online advertising for the consumer.

“’Audience’ and ‘context’ work together and it’s a balance we must learn to strike, but at the end of the day it’s about delivering a good, positive experience for the consumer.

“You might have to pay more for that, but isn’t that more valuable than farming out rubbish to the wrong people who don’t see it in the right frame of mind?”