Have you ever seen an ad for running shoes while reading an article about the rise of running on a website? This practice is called contextual advertising, and it predates the internet, explains Benito Marín, one of the guide’s authors and president of the Programmatic Commission of the association that brings together the digital marketing and advertising industry in Spain. He mentions that ” Placing ads in environments related to the topic they sell or promote has been done forever ; it’s like finding an ad for a sports brand in the newspaper AS ,” he emphasizes. It’s true that now it’s resonating powerfully, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), as an effective alternative to the disappearance of third-party cookies : those that the browser places on the user’s computer and track them across all the pages they visit. The before and after of institutional advertising
Álex Iranzo, general manager of the media agency Infinity Barcelona, notes that Google was one of the pioneers in building contextual targeting, although he questions whether this technology, based on keywords or tags, could be considered contextual in the strictest sense. “The mechanism is that if there’s an article or website that matches my key concepts, I insert my advertising there. It’s a concatenation of words that doesn’t analyze the context,” he points out.
The place of the hearing
That’s where cookies come in , and “we’ve moved from a model of buying advertising space to a model based on audience,” which means that it no longer matters where my message is hosted, but where my audience is, “whom I have to captivate, no matter where they are,” explains Iranzo. And so, cookies are overtaking contextual advertising as the main segmentation method.
“Third-party cookies have shifted the focus to tracking and personalization, not necessarily relevance and value,” says Carlos Estrada, Business Development Director at NP Digital. When Google announced its intention to eliminate them in 2020, after several delays it now seems likely to happen in 2024; it’s just a matter of time before it does. The industry is turning its attention to contextual advertising , “which, like everything relevant and valuable, has stood the test of time,” he points out. In fact, it has done more than survive, having allied itself with big data and artificial intelligence along the way, becoming “like putting on a superhero cape,” in Estrada’s words. This cape allows it not just to read words, but to understand the book, and opens the doors to audiovisual content, previously inaccessible.
AI helps with brand safety, mimicking a brand’s appearance in negative content, and boosts brand suitability , or finding the most appropriate environment to launch a particular message, according to the IAB Spain guide. Furthermore, it enables the automation of creative development, or, as Iranzo puts it, “not only contextualizes the environment, but also adapts the creative to that environment.” The executive illustrates this theory with the practical example of a hypothetical insomnia product: with tag-based segmentation, the ad risks appearing in negative or inaccurate content; big data ensures it will be launched in appropriate environments; AI makes it possible to understand the contexts and, based on them, work with concepts related to insomnia, such as sleep quality, tips for sleeping better, or recommendations for natural or chemical products, with different creative approaches in each case.
Greater efficiency
“In this era of privacy, with increasingly concerned, overwhelmed, and averse users to hyper-segmentation, contextual advertising offers numerous opportunities to be less intrusive, more relevant, and more effective,” emphasizes Paula Marín, Executive Creative Director at ES3. She continues, explaining that it allows you to capture the most valuable asset: the user’s attention, which can be doubled by placing the right message in the right environment. But the message itself remains essential, even with the perfect context, timing, and product. Paula Marín advocates avoiding clichés and generalizations . “Contextual advertising can perpetuate stereotypes, such as gender stereotypes, or challenge them. The key lies in creativity,” she asserts.
According to this specialist, contextual advertising often fails to make an impact with ads “where the only differentiating factor is the context, wasting attention with flat creativity that focuses on immediate conversion and misses the opportunity to build a long-term brand.”
In contrast, Marín gives (television) examples of creative, appropriate, relevant and even “memorable” contextual advertising: the Estrella Galicia and Netflix series Berlin ads during the last New Year’s Eve countdown ; Fi Network talking about its Estefaníííííaaaaa rate on Temptation Island (it was the cry that one of the boyfriends on the Tele 5 program shouted when he saw his partner kissing someone else), or MásMóvil’s Resines for president , with mentions of Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Pedro Sánchez, in the first batch of ads of the electoral debate prior to the last general elections.
Investing in new environments
According to the market statistics portal Statista, spending on contextual advertising worldwide in 2023 was approximately $227.38 billion, and is projected to more than double by 2030, reaching $562.1 billion. Other global reports present different figures, but all agree on its growth. Benito Marín finds it difficult to separate the numbers for this type of segmentation in Spain, and is unsure if such data even exists, but he is aware of its effectiveness, as indicated by various studies. Users are more receptive to advertising messages that are relevant to the content they are viewing . Benito Marín predicts that this trend will continue to rise, complementing other technologies such as first-party cookies and walled gardens.
