Contextual advertising is more than just those little text ads that pop up when you do a search on Google. But that company is heavily invested in making sure the strategy continues to grow to meet consumers' needs for information -- and advertisers' need for ways to provide it to them.
At the inaugural Adspace conference, part of this year's ad:tech San Francisco, a wide range of companies came together to present data, share ideas, and discuss the latest contextual advertising issues and solutions.
With more than $7 billion spent annually on this digital marketing strategy, contextual advertising is becoming a great equalizer -- a technique with reach, relevance and scale potential that spans audience segments and isn't exclusive to big brands with big budgets. But just as the industry is starting to recognize the possibilities, there remains plenty of questions to be answered, challenges to address, and best practices to be sorted out.
Adspace aims to move this process forward by giving both the ad and publishing sides a forum to hash out these issues, and even to address customer questions about their products and services head-on.
New techniques and technologies
At Adspace, plenty of representatives from the kings of contextual -- Google -- were on hand to do this, and to announce new developments with the company's own solution -- AdSense. Participating in a publisher forum, Jens Skakkebaek, group product manager for AdSense, announced the beta phase of its new keyword filtering product. In the words of Sean Harvey, business product manager at Google, it is an aggressive roadmap to give publishers and users more control over website ads.
In terms of advertiser choice of sites to place their contextual ads on, opt-out of certain sites or categories does not always work well, so the keyword filtering capability is just one of the company's solutions to control this process. "One thing we're always concerned with is how the ads you would normally want to block in a category end up performing on your site," said Gavin Bishop, head of publisher solutions at Google.
Extending the value of contextual
Down the hall, advertisers were given their own session track. Through a series of workshops with information, new technologies and capabilities were presented to help them extend the value of their contextual investments.
Keywords are obviously important to any contextual campaign. But Mani Iyer, CEO and founder of dynamic widget ad company Kwanzoo, Inc., wanted to stress that creative execution is just as important.
Iyer highlighted some case studies where the use of questions in conjunction with creative was incorporated into contextual campaigns. For example, by asking consumers "What kind of gamer are you?" in a widgetized ad not only gets them expressing their interests, it gets users to self-identify the contextual categories most likely to engage them. "You don't need to ask too many questions in a campaign to get users to share information and self-identify their categories," Iyer said.
Can contextual brand?
Though they are commonly considered by marketers to be a no-brainer for quick, easy, direct response campaigns, contextual strategies are beginning to extend further into affiliate marketing, lead generation, mobile marketing performance advertising, and even brand advertising -- a segment of the contextual industry that is often overlooked.
Oded Itzhak, founder and CEO of Doclix, discussed some of the limitations of the technique, including the loss of the visual element that is present in display advertising, and the difficulty in maintaining a presence with a specific target demographic.
Yet, these limitations can be overcome with some solid best practices. Itzhak's company solutions include longer-form and more customizable text ads, and Itzhak recommends that marketers introduce an element of education to the ad message, and should optimize ads on a per-site basis. He also stressed that transparency is a vital part of any contextual campaign -- no matter what the ultimate marketing goal.
Jodi Harris is senior editor at iMedia Connection.
