Wait a minute. Contextual targeting? Yes, the old-good contextual targeting.

Advertising works best when its message is relevant. And engaging. It simply needs to speak to a current customer’s needs. Or create a desire to have one. That is why you should employ contextual targeting again. Although you fired it after recruiting behavioural targeting ten years ago.

Let’s say some 50% of your marketing budget goes to online. The brand building takes half of that. No wonder you want it to work. Luckily, its impact has become clearly measurable. While the tactics of spray and pray might bring you some results, it pays off to spend a minute or two thinking of a good targeting setup. Including contextual.

With the evolution of machine learning and AI, it all becomes easier, smarter and more powerful. Instead of thinking about all possible variants of all words that might relate to your brand/product, thanks to the semantic engine, you now select a set of topics (i.e. healthy living, sports car, Manchester United).

Why bother: increased brand awareness

Which ad is more likely to attract your attention when reading an article about green energy? One for a solar panel, a green electricity tariff, or a zero-emissions newspaper? I bet in such a context, any of those would deliver a higher brand consideration, especially once they appear at a decent frequency within a period of two weeks plus.

For the last couple of years, the loud voice promoting user-oriented targeting and retargeting has been ubiquitous. Some would say the context does not matter at all. Here I would object, albeit being the promoter of user-oriented targeting myself. The chief reason why your campaigns run on premium online media is brand safety. Secondly (try this with your partner or boss), your message gets along only when its recipient is tuned to its context.

Why bother: increased reach

In addition to reinforcing your brand/product consideration, combining contextual segments with behavioral, socio-demographic, and intent to buy targeting will broaden your target audience's reach. That goes in two streams:

1. Not every visitor will expose their identity to you anymore, especially when it comes to profiling of their mid-term interests and intents. And this will get worse after the sunset of third-party cookies (which occurred in some browsers two and a half years ago).
2. Contextual advertising works with the surroundings of your ad (a.k.a. content), the prime focus of its reader. This group will complement the well-built profile groups of your consumers and prospects.

What should you do as of today?

Consider adding contextual segments to every single campaign that you run. It will expand their reach and increase the frequency of fulfillment. At the same time, it will strengthen your brand/product consideration metrics. And finally, only by employing contextual targeting can you deliver a personalised message to those Safari users.

?Your life will be easier after the sunset of third-party cookies if you begin to adapt to it now.