Contextual ad targeting paves the way for new opportunities
Advertisers and marketers are always looking for ways to remain competitive in the current digital landscape. The challenge of signal loss continues to prompt marketers to rethink their current and future strategies. With many major browsers phasing out support for third-party cookies due to privacy and data security concerns, marketers will need to find new ways to identify and reach their target audience. Contextual ad targeting offers an innovative solution; a way to combine contextual signals with machine learning to engage with your consumers more deeply through highly targeted accuracy. Contextual advertising can help you reach your desired audiences amidst signal loss – but what exactly is contextual advertising, and how can it help optimize digital ad success?
In a Q&A with our experts, Jason Andersen, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Partner Solutions with Experian, and Alex Johnston, Principal Product Manager with Yieldmo, they explore:
- The challenges causing marketers to rethink their current strategies
- How contextual advertising addresses signal loss
- Why addressability is more important than ever
- Why good creative is still integral in digital marketing
- Tips for digital ad success
By understanding what contextual advertising can offer, you’ll be on the path toward creating powerful, effective campaigns that will engage your target audiences.
Check out Jason and Alex’s full conversation from our webinar, “Making the Most of Your Digital Ad Budget With Contextual Advertising and Audience Insights” by reading below. Or watch the full webinar recording now!
Macro impacts affecting marketers
How important is it for digital marketers to stay informed about the changes coming to third-party cookies, and what challenges do you see signal loss creating?
Jason: Marketers must stay informed to succeed as the digital marketing landscape continuously evolves. Third-party cookies have already been eliminated from Firefox, Safari, and other browsers, while Chrome has held out. It’s just a matter of time before Chrome eliminates them too. Being proactive now by predicting potential impacts will be essential for maintaining growth when the third-party cookie finally disappears.
Alex: Jason, I think you nailed it. Third-party cookie loss is already a reality. As regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) take effect, more than 50% of exchange traffic lacks associated identifiers. This means that marketers have to think differently about how they reach their audiences in an environment with fewer data points available for targeting purposes. It’s no longer something to consider at some point down the line – it’s here now!
Also, as third-party cookies become more limited, reaching users online is becoming increasingly complex and competitive. Without access to as much data, the CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) that advertisers must pay are skyrocketing because everyone is trying to bid on those same valuable consumers. It’s essential for businesses desiring success in digital advertising now more than ever before.
Contextual ad targeting: A solution for signal loss
How does contextual ad targeting help digital marketers find new ways to reach and engage with consumers? What can you share about some new strategies that have modernized marketing, such as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
Jason: We’re taking contextual marketing to the next level with advanced machine learning. We are unlocking new insights from data beyond what a single page can tell us about users. As third-party cookies go away, alternative identifiers are coming to market, like RampID and UID2. These are going to be particularly important for marketers to be able to utilize.
As cookie syncing becomes outdated, marketers will have to look for alternative methods to reach their target audiences. It’s essential to look beyond cookie-reliant solutions and use other options available regarding advertising.
Alex: I think, as Jason alluded to, there’s a renaissance in contextual advertising over the last couple of years. If I were to break this down, there are three core drivers:
- The loss of identity signals. It’s forcing us to change, and we must look elsewhere and figure out how to reach our audiences differently.
- There have been considerable advances in our ability to store and operate across a set of contextual signals far more extensive than anything we’ve ever worked with in the past and in far more granular ways. That’s a huge deal because when it comes to machine learning, the power and the impact of those machine learning models are entirely based on how extensive and granular the data set is that you can collect. Machine learning can pull together critical contextual signals and figure out which constellations, or which combinations of those signals, are most predictive and valuable to a given advertiser.
- We can tailor machine learning models to individual advertisers using all those signals and find patterns across those in ways that were previously impractical or unfeasible. The transformation is occurring because of our ability to capture much more granular data, operate across it, and then build models that work for advertisers.
Addressability: Connect your campaigns to consumers
How does advanced contextual targeting help marketers reach non-addressable audiences?
Jason: Advanced contextual targeting allows us to take a set of known data (identity) and draw inferences from it with all the other signals we see across the bitstream. It’s taking that small seed set of either, customers that transacted with you before that you have an identity for, or customers that match whom you’re looking for. We can use that as a seed set to train these new contextual models. We can now look at making the unknown known or the unaddressable addressable. So, it’s not addressable in an identity sense, it is addressable in a contextual or an advanced contextual sense that’s made available to us, and we can derive great insight from it.
One of the terms I like to use is contextual indexing. This is where we take a set of users we know something about. So, I may know the identity of a particular group of households, and I can look at how those households index against any of the rich data sets available to us in any data marketplace, for example, the data Yieldmo has. We can look at how that data indexes to those known users to find patterns in that data and then extrapolate from that. Now we can go out and find users surfing on any of the other sites that traditionally don’t have that identifier for that user or don’t at that moment in time and start to be able to advertise to them based on the contextually indexed data.
Historically, we’ve done some contextual ad targeting based on geo-contextual, and this is when people wanted to do one to one marketing, and geo-contextual outperformed the one to one. But marketers weren’t ready for alternatives to one to one yet. We want marketers to start testing these solutions. Advertisers must start trying them, learning how they work, and learn how to optimize them because they are based on a feedback loop, and they’re only going to get better with feedback.
Alex: Jason, you described that perfectly. I think the exciting opportunity for many people in the industry is figuring out how to reach your known audience in a non-addressable space, that is based on environmental and non-identity based signals, that helps your campaign perform. Your known audience are people that are already converting – those who like your products and services and are engaged with your ads. Machine learning advancements allow you to take your small sample audience and uncover those patterns in the non-addressable space.
It’s also worth noting that in this world in which we are using seed audiences, or you are using your performing audiences to build non-addressable counterpart targeting campaigns, having high-quality, privacy-resilient data sets becomes incredibly important. In many cases, companies like Experian, who have high quality, deep rich training data, are well positioned to support advertisers in building those extension audiences. As we see the industry evolve, we’re going to see some significant changes in terms of the types of, and ways in which, companies offer data, and make that available to advertisers for training their models or supporting validation and measurement of those models.
Jason: Addressable users, the new identity-based users, are critical to marketers’ performance initiatives. They’re essential to training the models we’re building with contextual advertising. Together, addressable users and contextual advertising are a powerful combination. It’s not just one in isolation. It’s not just using advanced contextual, and it’s not just using the new identifiers. It’s using a combination to meet your performance needs.
It’s imperative to start thinking about how you can begin building your seed audiences. What can you start learning from, and how do you put contextual into play today? You are looking to build off a known set and build a more advanced model. These can be specialized models based on your data. You can hone in and create a customized model for your customer type, their profile, and how they transact. It’s a greenfield opportunity, and we’re super excited about the future of advanced contextual targeting.
Turn great creative into measurable data points
Why does good creative still play an integral part in digital advertising success?
Jason: Good creative has always been meaningful. It’s vital in getting people to click on your ad and transact. But it’s becoming increasingly important in this new world that we’re talking about, this advanced contextual world. The more signal that we can get coming into these models, the better. Good creative in the proper ad format that you can test and learn from is paramount. It comes back to that feedback loop. We can use that as another signal in this equation to develop and refine the right set of audiences for your targeting needs.
Alex: If you imagine within the broader context of identity and signal loss, creative and ad format becomes incredibly powerful signals in understanding how different audiences interact with and engage with different creative. In the case of the formats that serve on the Yieldmo exchange, we’re collecting data every 200 milliseconds around how individual users are engaging with those ads. Interaction data like the user scrolling back or the number of pixel seconds they stay on the screen, fills this critical gap between video completes and clicks. Clicks are sparse and down the funnel, and views and completes are up the funnel. All those attention and creative engagement type metrics occupy the sweet spot where they’re super prevalent, and you can collect them and understand how different audiences engage with your ads. That data lets you build powerful models because they predict all kinds of other downstream actions.
Throughout my career, I learned that designing or tailoring your creative to different audience groups is one of the best ways to improve performance. We ran many lift studies with analysis to understand how you can tailor creative customized for individual audiences. That capability and the ability to do that on an identity basis is starting to deteriorate. The ability to do that using a sample of data or using a smaller set of users, either where you’re inferring characteristics or you’re looking at the identity that does exist in a smaller group, becomes powerful for being able to customize your creative to tell the right story to the right audience. When you layer together all the interaction data collected at the creative level on top of all the contextual and environmental signals, you can build powerful models. Whether those are driving proxy metrics, or downstream outcomes, puts us in a powerful position to respond to the broader loss of identity that we’ve relied on for so many years.
Our recommendations for marketers for 2023 and beyond
Do you have recommendations for marketers building out their yearly strategies or a campaign strategy?
Jason: Be proactive and start testing and learning these new solutions. I mentioned addressability and being in the right place at the right time. That’s easier in today’s third-party cookie world. But as traditional identity is further constricted, you will have these first-party solutions that will not be at scale, so you’re less likely to find your user at the scale you want. It would be best if you thought about how to reach that user at the right place at the right time. They may not be seen from an identity basis. They might not be at the right place at the right time when you were delivering or trying to deliver an ad. But you increase your chance of reaching them by building these advanced contextual targeting audiences using this privacy-safe seed ‘opted-in’ user set; this is a way to cast that wider net and achieve targeted scale.
Alex: Build your seed lists, test your formats with different audiences, and understand what’s resonating with whom. Take advantage of some of the pretty remarkable advances in machine learning that are allowing us, really, for the first time to fully uncork the potential and the opportunity with contextual in a way that we’ve never done before.
Jason: At the end of the day, it’s making the unaddressable addressable. So, it’s a complementary strategy; having that addressable piece will feed the models. But also, that addressable piece still needs to be identity-based, addressable still needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy, and you need to complement it with other strategies like advanced contextual targeting. The two of them together are super complimentary. They learn from each other, and it’s a cyclical loop. Now is the time to take advantage and start testing and understanding how these solutions work.
We can help you get started with contextual ad targeting
Contextual advertising can help you stay ahead of the curve, identify your target audience, and continue to drive conversions despite signal loss. We’ve partnered with Yieldmo to help make sure that your marketing campaigns are reaching the right target audiences on the platforms that are most relevant. To get started with contextual ad targeting to reach the right audience at the right time and drive conversions, contact our marketing professionals. Let’s get to work, together.
Find the right marketing mix in 2023
Check out our webinar, “Find the right marketing mix with rising consumer expectations.” Guest speaker, Nikhil Lai, Senior Analyst from Forrester Research, joins Experian experts Erin Haselkorn, and Eden Wilbur. We discuss:
- New data on the complexity and uncertainty facing marketers
- Consumer trends for 2023
- Recommendations on finding the right channel mix and the right consumers
Get in touch
About our experts
Jason Andersen, Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives and Partner Solutions, Experian
Jason Andersen heads Strategic Initiatives and Partner Enablement for Experian Marketing Services. He focuses on addressability and activation in digital marketing and working with partners to solve signal loss. Jason has worked in digital advertising for 15+ years, spanning roles from operations and product to strategy and partnerships.
Alex Johnston, Principal Product Manager, Yieldmo
Alex Johnston is the Principal Product Manager at Yieldmo, overseeing the Machine Learning and Optimization products. Before joining Yieldmo, Alex spent 13 years at Google, where he led the Reach & Audience Planning and Measurement products, overseeing a 10X increase in revenue. During his time, he launched numerous ad products, including YouTube’s Google Preferred offering. To learn more about Yieldmo, visit www.Yieldmo.com.
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Linear TV advertising — also known as traditional or broadcast TV advertising — refers to scheduled ad programming broadcasted over traditional channels. While it doesn’t dominate the spotlight as it used to, it’s still a significant force in advertising today because of its vast potential to reach broad audiences and create memorable moments through high-profile events. Broadcast and cable TV, both forms of linear TV, still account for around 24% and 26% of U.S. TV viewership, respectively. As marketers look for ways to combine traditional and digital strategies, knowing how linear TV still fits into the mix can create value for brands and provide new opportunities for broader reach and engagement. This article explores the relevance and benefits of linear TV and how traditional broadcast television can complement digital platforms alongside changing viewing preferences. Linear TV vs. digital channels Even though linear TV has maintained impressive viewership, it’s impossible to ignore the growing influence of advanced TV platforms like OTT (over-the-top) streaming services and connected TV (CTV). These digital channels have changed how audiences consume content, complemented traditional linear TV, and created new marketing opportunities. Each offers unique advertising value, and knowing how linear and certain forms of advanced TV stack up can help advertisers make informed choices about where to focus their efforts. Linear TV Linear TV is regularly scheduled programming on networks like ABC or NBC. The name refers to its linear delivery of content on a set schedule, with all viewers tuning in at the same time. It's great for reaching large audiences during live events or prime-time shows but lacks the precise targeting options available on digital platforms. Targeting: Advertisers can only target broad demographics (age, gender, location) but not specific interests or behaviors. Ad format: Ad formats typically take the form of non-interactive ads, usually 15-, 30-, or 60-second spots shown during commercial breaks. Viewer engagement: Viewing is passive, as ads are shown at fixed times and cannot be skipped. OTT OTT refers to streaming services that bypass traditional cable or satellite to deliver content through the internet on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Peacock. Content is available on-demand and accessible on devices like laptops, tablets, smart TVs, and smartphones. OTT is flexible, so viewers can watch what they want when they want. Targeting: OTT offers precise targeting using interest, viewing behavior, and location data to personalize ads. Ad formats: Formats can include pre-roll, mid-roll, sponsored content, and sometimes interactive ads to drive engagement. Viewer engagement: Viewers can control their experience with the ability to pause, skip, or replay content depending on the platform’s features. CTV CTV refers specifically to televisions connected to the internet through built-in smart features or external devices like Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, or Roku. CTV is a delivery mechanism for streaming OTT content to the TV screen, making it like an intersection between traditional TV and digital streaming. Targeting: Similar to OTT, CTV allows precise targeting based on viewer data such as preferences, behaviors, and geographic location. Ad formats: Includes pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, and, in some cases, interactive ad features like clickable banners or in-ad actions. Viewer engagement: Engagement levels are higher than linear TV, as viewers are often more active participants who can pause or interact with ads. A brief comparison: Linear TV, OTT, and CTV The main differences between OTT and CTV are in their delivery and access. OTT refers to the streaming services providing content, regardless of the device, while CTV refers to the internet-enabled TV screens through which OTT content is consumed. They’re complementary, with OTT defining the content and CTV shaping the viewing experience on the largest screen in the house. Each TV platform has its own strengths. Linear TV is great for reaching a broad audience with memorable ads, while OTT and CTV offer more precise targeting and greater viewer engagement. Advertisers should consider using a mix of these platforms, taking advantage of each one’s benefits to create a well-rounded advertising strategy. Benefits of linear TV in the modern advertising landscape While consumer behavior has shifted toward digital content consumption, the sheer scale and influence of pre-scheduled, real-time broadcast TV advertising makes it a powerful tool for brand advertising within a broad media strategy. When integrated with digital strategies, linear TV can widen your reach, foster brand safety, and boost viewer engagement, to name a few benefits. Mass reach and brand visibility Broadcast TV advertising has a massive reach, especially during live events and news broadcasts. It delivers content to large, diverse audiences at once — something digital platforms, with often fragmented and niche targeting, cannot achieve on the same scale. To put things in perspective, there are nearly as many linear TV viewers today (228 million) as social media users (236 million), according to eMarketer. This helps marketers earn brand visibility and recognition across broad demographics and make an impact on their target audience. Advertisers can also use linear TV to reach multiple individuals in a single household, making it an efficient way to run household-focused marketing campaigns. Linear TV advertising increases the likelihood that a diverse audience residing in one household will see your content. Brand safety and controlled environment One of linear TV's most important advantages is its controlled, brand-safe environment. Unlike digital platforms, where ads can appear alongside user-generated content or in unpredictable and sometimes risky settings, linear TV offers a more curated environment. Advertisers can be confident their message will be delivered in a professionally regulated context so viewers develop a positive, reliable brand association. Diversify your marketing mix Some demographics are underserved by digital channels and are more likely to see ads on linear TV than on an internet-connected device. Top U.S. advertisers obtain more impressions among adults over 55 using linear TV ads, with Baby Boomers spending an average of 5 hours and 46 minutes daily on linear TV. This highlights why it’s so critical to diversify your marketing mix with various channels that help you tap into audiences your competitors may not be. Preferred hosting for major events Digital platforms are hosting more live events every year, but linear TV is still the most successful and reliable medium for major events like elections, breaking news, award shows, primetime TV, and the Super Bowl. In fact, linear TV dominated the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, with major networks achieving off-the-chart ratings and more than 42 million cable viewers nationwide. Guaranteed ad exposure While many digital platforms allow viewers to skip ads, linear TV ads have stayed unskippable and ensured viewers receive full exposure to marketing content. With traditional TV ads reaching as long as 60 seconds, this guaranteed viewership is a chance you can’t miss to capture your audience's attention. Viewer engagement and ad recall Paired with CTV, linear TV is exceptionally good at engaging viewers and facilitating strong recall with high-quality content. A recent study by Brightline found that, even in 2024, linear TV maintains the highest ad attention with an attention rate of 54.5%, surpassed only by premium CTV with a 56.1% attention rate. When viewers are highly engaged with TV programming, they’re also more likely to remember the aired ads, which boosts ad effectiveness and sales potential. According to a Comcast Advertising study, long-form TV and streaming ads are also twice as memorable as short-form mobile digital ads. This study revealed that TV ads garnered more visual attention than digital mobile ads, as participants watched 71% of the TV ads compared to the 30% they watched on mobile. Ads viewed in the TV environment even resulted in 2.2x higher unaided recall and 1.3x greater purchase intent than mobile digital ads. Traditional TV advertising, combined with digital, creates a full-screen, lean-back viewing experience that makes lasting impressions and elevates consumer memory. Current trends in TV advertising While it's true that linear TV is facing a viewership decline as audiences shift to digital platforms, it’s not disappearing entirely. Advertisers are finding new ways to innovate within the confines of linear TV and using advancements in targeting, content delivery, and OTT platform integrations. Free ad-supported television services (FAST) For one, linear TV is finding a new lease on life through FAST services; FAST channels bridge the gap between traditional linear TV and contemporary streaming preferences to reshape how audiences engage with ad-supported content. The main appeal of FAST is its ability to deliver curated, genre-specific programming combined with on-demand options. Roughly 70% of streaming users know about FAST and have used it within the last three months. Unlike traditional video-on-demand (VOD) platforms focused on high-profile originals and on-demand access, FAST channels bring back the structured, live grid format that mimics classic TV viewing experiences. Services like Pluto TV, Tubi, and the Roku Channel have captured significant audience share by blending nostalgia with modern accessibility. These agile, scalable platforms help media companies quickly launch new channels, as they did with NBCUniversal’s recent addition of 48 channels on Freevee and Xumo Play. High-impact events Certain genres, like live sports and award shows, continue to dominate on linear TV, including: The Super Bowl Other major NFL games The NBA Finals The Olympics The Oscars The Grammy Awards The Emmy Awards These events attract massive audiences and are a prime spot for advertisers. However, even live sports are transitioning to OTT platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Peacock. Platforms like Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and ESPN+ are starting to secure exclusive streaming rights for major sports events and changing viewership patterns, which creates fiercer competition for linear TV. On the flip side, marketers have new opportunities in OTT environments to enjoy the reach of traditional TV advertising with more precise targeting. Linear programmatic TV While linear TV faces growing competition from digital channels, it’s adapting to meet marketers’ needs through innovations like linear programmatic TV. This approach automates the buying and placement of ads on traditional TV so advertisers can apply data-driven insights for more precise targeting. Unlike traditional linear ad buys, which rely on fixed schedules and broad audience demographics, programmatic technology allows for greater efficiency, flexibility, and strategic alignment. Recent forecasts show linear programmatic TV growing steadily throughout 2025 and being a valuable transitional tool that combines linear TV’s reach with digital platforms’ personalization and measurability. Cloud TV Cloud TV modernizes the traditional TV advertising experience by combining its established infrastructure with the best features of digital streaming and OTT. Companies like Vodafone and Viacom18 are transforming linear TV into a more flexible and scalable cloud-based service that delivers linear content alongside streaming options. Users can now conveniently access live TV and on-demand content from one interface. Currently, platforms like YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV blend linear broadcasts with OTT streaming in the cloud so that viewers can watch traditional TV channels and access on-demand shows all in one place. This means advertisers can deliver targeted, personalized messages to the right audiences without losing the large-scale reach of linear TV and engage people across live TV and digital content. Addressable TV and advanced targeting Linear TV has always been limited by broad targeting, showing the same ad to everyone, no matter who’s watching. Addressable TV changes the game, letting advertisers deliver different ads to specific households during the same program so brands can reach the right people with messages that matter to them. The key to making this work is authenticated audiences. These are viewers who log in to platforms with verified information, giving advertisers better insights into their interests, behaviors, and demographics. This level of audience data allows for smarter audience segmentation and more effective ads based on interests, demographics, and behaviors. With Experian’s addressable TV audiences and strategic partnerships, you can execute highly targeted and measurable TV campaigns. Using reliable first-party data and universal identifiers (like Unified I.D. 2.0), which link consumer profiles across devices and channels, we help brands reach the right viewers on traditional TV and CTV platforms and ensure the right person sees the right ad at the best time without overexposure. How to integrate linear TV with digital marketing strategies Integrating linear TV with digital marketing strategies starts with aligning campaigns with audience behaviors and preferences. Using data-driven insights, brands can ensure their TV efforts complement digital channels to create a unified, impactful experience. Experian simplifies this process with advanced identity resolution and audience insights. Our identity graph and syndicated audiences can help your brand: Link TV ad exposures to online engagement and create a seamless experience across platforms. Measure cross-channel performance and understand how linear TV contributes to digital outcomes. Use enriched audience data to tailor ads that resonate for relevance and consistency across TV and digital. We’re ready to help you maximize the effectiveness of your TV advertising campaigns. Ready to connect with Experian’s TV experts? Partner with a leader in data and identity to achieve the full potential of your television marketing. Our innovative tools and collaborations with top industry platforms provide exciting opportunities for you to reach and engage your ideal audience. Let us help you transform your strategies and maximize your marketing ROI with our advanced TV solutions. Talk to our TV experts Contact us Latest posts