Attacking wastage in media

John Snyder, CEO at Grapeshot, explains why “contextual targeting delivers results”…

Attacking wastage in the media-buy is an important recession-busting way for agencies to deliver more to their advertisers, for less.

The idea of re-targeting an internet user is not new. A cookie is dropped in a user’s browser when they visit one site, and the same user is re-targeted when they visit a second site in the same network. Large behavioural networks can show you a car advertisement when you visit the Guardian website on the basis that you visited Auto Trader a few weeks back.

Behavioural targeting certainly appears a sensible way to avoid the “spray and pray” of digital advertising: but the competition for hard dollars is tougher.

Google will happily take advertising and e-commerce budgets for Search. If you buy keywords using Adwords, you are defining a clear association between the message you want to communicate and what the user is actually doing there and then. It would be very confusing to get automobile advertising when you go to Google and search for “World Cup opening ceremony”! Google delivers keyword relevance.

Grapeshot has equipped several UK publishers with the ability to deliver advertising using the same principle.  Using contextual targeting, rather than simple behavioural targeting, Grapeshot’s algorithms developed at Cambridge University, profile each page view in real-time to understand the important keywords and phrases. So an article about death, accident or car crash can be hygiene checked before an ad is potentially shown.

Most importantly the page view can act like a user on Google, where the keywords on the page make a real-time request for the best display ad. Grapeshot algorithms review all the words on the page to make a live contextual search for the right display ad.

Using keywords for Display opens up a new layer of advertising opportunity and precision. At IPC Media, an advertiser such as Rimmel can look for certain page views around certain celebrities (Kate Moss) or high street brands (Primark), as well as useful keywords in cosmetics such as lips, skin, eye-line and the like. Rather than being sold Run Of Site (ROS) or a standard editorial channel like “Fashion”, the advertiser can command a collection of words which together define the concepts and campaign brief for their display creative. Display advertising for Rimmel is only shown when several words on the page are contextually relevant.

Contextual targeting delivers results. IPC Media announced that Grapeshot contextual targeting was lifting click through rates up by 30 to 113%.

Grapeshot has seen the same lift in Click Through Rates repeated for B2B publishers like Incisive Media, and large regional newspaper inventory across Johnston Press. It stands to reason that a display ad is more relevant to what a user is reading on the page is more likely to be clicked.

So why is contextual technology important to a media-buyer?

Publishers, site by site, can editorially segment the channels to offer premium content, and hence premium audience. However the large media-buy often straddles several sites, so the ability to carve a niche virtual channel across these sites is important – as contextual technology helps to identify which page views are most relevant to the keyword brief you have given your display campaign.

But there is a more fundamental opportunity. Instead of buying ready-made chunks of inventory, pre-packages and with a finite volume of page views or ad impressions, Grapeshot liberates the ad campaign to compete every time to be the most relevant.

Google uses relevance algorithms to judge the best set of search results. Grapeshot uses search algorithms to find the most relevant display campaign for each page view. This means several campaigns, each with a set of words to define their target keywords, need to compete against each other to be the most relevant. So does the Rimmel campaign win against the Nokia campaign, based on the evidence of words on the page? Grapeshot uses probability algorithms to define the relevance of keywords, pages, and campaigns. Grapeshot can also allow Ad Ops to increase or decrease the weights of campaigns to ensure the volumes of ads served can be “throttled” to the correct level of sold/bought ad impressions.

Of course, with proper re-targeting you can use the contextual knowledge of the page a user reads to put important keywords around each user, or cookie id. The result is behavioural retargeting, not using the car website someone visited last week, but what the user is interested in right now.

Deploying a keyword strategy to display advertising introduces more relevance, akin to the revolution which Google has delivered in Search. Display needs to box clever to win more budget and demonstrate better effectiveness and user response. Grapeshot contextual targeting delivers the keyword dimension for Display.