We are sitting at the 4th week of conflict in the Middle East, but absolutely nothing has been done on the contextual targeting of ads during this time.
Today, when I opened a news site, I was targeted with baby food and baby wipes ads on a page that was discussing how children lives are being affected.
The irony is not lost on anyone. It is sad, annoying, and depressing that marketers do not make the extra effort to address the issue of contextual advertising.
Today, a regular user sees more than a hundred ads across the web and app ecosystem, and most likely, they don’t remember any.
Still, if you deliver an ad totally out of context, they tend to remember you for being completely insensitive.
It is not easy to be a marketer today, but there are tools you can use to be more contextually relevant to your users.
Contextual marketing is crucial because it enables brands to deliver more relevant and targeted advertising to users. It allows you to avoid the pitfalls of the news cycle.
Today, as we accept and swallow the post-truth era, it will become more difficult for marketers to influence their audience.
This is where contextual marketing will play a significant role.
While the marketing goal stays the same, i.e., delivering suitable ads to a suitable consumer base, it will have an added responsibility to understand the consumer’s emotions.
Following your consumers across the internet is no longer relevant to sell your products.
Let us consider an example, Zoe and Stan are expecting a child, and they start looking at baby names and books on parenting etc.
The cookies from Zoe & Stan’s devices make them an apt target for baby and maternity-related products. As the internet works on a 30-day lifecycle of the cookies, this information remains valid for 30 days, and the baby product companies chase Zoe and stan on every website they visit.
Now, imagine something goes wrong, and they have a miscarriage; now, every site they visit reminds them of this sad truth all the time. They can’t seem to catch a break.
Marketers will argue that this information is too private, and they can’t know, and my friends, that is why contextual ads become essential. It is most likely that Zoe and Stan stopped visiting the regular sites, but the cookies remember them.
My humble submission is that, in the coming days, you will have to master contextual relevancy to stand out. If content is king, context is kingmaker.
By Debsena Chakraborty, VP Growth EMEA at mFilterIt
