Thought Leadership: Advertising’s Holy Grail: The right ad in the right environment, every time

Our latest Media Playground Thought Leadership article, by Grapeshot CEO John Snyder, explains how technology can consign a 19th century observation to history.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I do not know which half,” John Wanamaker, 1838-1922, US department store merchant.

Digital has given advertisers a power that for so long has seemed like an impossible dream: accountability and accurate measurement. However, for publishers this has presented somewhat of a double edged sword in that suddenly their brands are being scrutinised for effectiveness like never before. Additionally, the glut of supply of online audiences has made the exciting new possibilities of digital a very challenging market to drive revenue and realise value.

Publishers rightly still retain massive power because it is their content which delivers the audiences. With so much supply, advertisers need more help in navigating their way to the most effective audiences. Traditional behavioural targeting solutions go a long way in aiding this navigation and are very effective. However, contextual targeting and user-context re-targeting gives the publisher and the advertiser another valuable layer of targeting intelligence.

Real time and automatic optimisation

If you agree with the premise that advertising is more effective if it appears in the right environment, imagine the possibilities if you deployed a technology which effectively hosts a real time competition to marry the right ad with the right page view. No manual tagging, no predefined audience groups, simply the ability to re-shuffle inventory to deliver the best possible ad environment match every time. When there isn’t an obvious context, on say a homepage or section head, you can simply use the keywords stored against the anonymous cookie ID to re-target the user against their very specific interests. This further improves overall targeting efficiency.

Fundamentally, technology should be a liberating force for both buyer and seller. Contextual optimisation simply optimises publisher’s inventory automatically to generate the greatest possible value for both the publisher and the advertiser. Premiums for this service are rightly demanded as effectively the publisher is optimising their content in a way that cuts away all the wastage to deliver the perfect campaign possible for the advertiser.

Engagement

If you deliver the right environment for the advertiser then the performance of the campaign will become more effective. Studies demonstrate that by deploying contextual, or as Grapeshot would recommend contextual and behavioural targeting, campaign performances become significantly more effective. When we have deployed Grapeshot in both B2B and B2C markets we have seen significant improvements in click through rates. CTR’s are only one element of demonstrating effectiveness but uplifts have been too dramatic to ignore with average rates improving by over 30% on A/B tests we undertook with Incisive Media and Johnston Press.

Keywords / Content

Every word and every article that is created by a publisher is valuable. However, because of forces outside of their control the vast majority of publishers’ content is considered as low value or run of site (ROS). A typical example is the numerous page views of news content that remains hard for publishers to manually segment: instead the high volume audience of news content is sold simply as ROS. Contextual targeting creates the value by segmenting seemingly homogenous content into virtual channels. Never again will publishers need to ask permission from editorial to create a niche editorial channel in order to make more money. Simply deliver the niche audience virtually, leaving editorial with the important task of producing the best possible content for their site, which is where their expertise lies.

We know that search works; it has transformed the internet and changed advertising forever. Contextual targeting and user context re-targeting effectively allow both publisher and advertiser the opportunity to apply the same SEO magic to display advertising, thus eliminating a huge portion of advertising wastage observed by by Wanamaker in the 19th century!