26th June 2018  |  

The rise of culturally relevant targeting

Welcome to Contextual 2.0, where brands should be using cultural relevance to avoid their ads being ignored.

Last week, Audience Project added to the growing body of research proving that irrelevant advertising is bad for the consumer and bad for the industry – in this case, highlighting that 50% of consumers point to irrelevant adverts as a driver for installing ad-blocking.

We know that people aren’t against ads in general, but they are against irrelevant ones. In a post-GDPR environment, marketers are pulling back from cookie-based behavioural targeting and turning back to another form of relevance marketing: Contextual Targeting. What someone is reading tells you what they are interested in and, according to ComScore, where they are reading it will impact how effective the advertising is.

However, marketers are no longer satisfied with broad-brush verticals. Clients want purpose-built segments nuanced to their particular themes, topics or brand ambassadors. New tools allow us to build custom segments for each and every campaign, allowing them to be tailored and refined to an incredible degree. These technologies also mean that a new type of contextual targeting is now possible, and we are calling this Cultural Relevance…

Culturally Relevant marketing

Cultural relevance is different, and arguably much harder to do. Advertisers need to know where to look, assess if it’s something they should be involved with and be in a position to take action, within an ever decreasing timeframe.

Navigating the cultural landscape is undoubtedly a minefield. Social media means that ‘hot topics’ can spring up, evolve, transform and burn out all in a matter of hours. We know that Wimbledon will be a big deal each summer, but who could have predicted the Blue or White dress phenomenon? Or the cultural explosion that was Love Island in 2017? Publishers could see the huge popularity of these topics instantly.

What’s more, many clients now believe that they must stand for something, often by taking positions on cultural issues. Whether you feel this a viable marketing approach or not (see the recent backlash toward Lush), there is no doubt that being part of the conversation is an essential strategy for most advertisers.

However, it’s often hard to know where to look and who is responsible. Is it a PR agency’s job or a creative agency’s, or maybe even a consultancy’s duty? Is it Buzz monitoring, social listening or trend analysis? And, now we have entered the realms of ‘big data’, multiple APIs can pull disparate data into dynamic dashboards – but who is keeping an eye on these and how do they activate this info?

How can publishers help?

Publishers are in a unique position. By creating the content that people consume, they are better placed than anyone to understand in real-time what people are reading and interacting with. At MailOnline, we don’t use algorithms to dictate what people see. If it is popular content, it rises to the top of our site, and so is a true reflection of what the public (25m unique visitors a month!) want to read.

Out Trending Topics tool can alert you via email whenever we publish an article that meets your own unique keyword criteria. This could be traditional contextual topics (e.g. brand ambassadors, topics and interests), but it could also be cultural relevance. What are the most read articles? What is most shared or most commented on? What has the highest ‘velocity’ score?

The other positive is that publishers can also be the vehicle to activate these trends. By placing high-impact formats on low fraud, high-viewability sites, where readers are actively engaging with our content (and adverts, according to research by Lumen), there is no better place to be part of the conversation. Early research by one of our launch partners has shown that adverts served within highly relevant articles – cherry picked using our Trending Topics tool – perform up to 20% better than those targeted using traditional demo and interest segments.

The shift back to contextual is a great opportunity for both advertisers and publishers, and new technologies and tools means we can now do this better than ever before. The benefits for everyone are clear: working together to reduce irrelevant advertising has to be a strong focus in 2019.

by Bedir Aydemir, Insight & Data Strategy Director at Mail Metro Media