Understanding the New Contextual Age of Advertising

The First Contextual Age of Advertising started circa 3000 BC with an ad on papyrus posted to a rock in the Egyptian city of Thebes. It was an ad for Hapu's Custom Fabric Shop. The ad was placed in a high-foot-traffic location where upper-class people frequently passed. The same city around the same time saw much more papyri-based advertising, including political ads and ads for various religions. The Hapu ad today is in the British Museum in London.

From then through the 20^th Century, the First Contextual Age flourished. Handbills, pamphlets and specialized newsletters were able to charge more if they were perceived to either reach larger audiences and/or if the audiences were the types of people considered most likely to buy and/or if the credibility of the source of other content near the ad was considered to be so high as to rub off on the ad. This carried over most strongly to the magazine medium when it appeared, and from there into radio and television.

The founders of the internet declared firmly at the outset that there would be no advertising. This pipe dream quickly vanished as reality seeped in. The first ads in digital had choice of placement in high credibility environments as well as less professional ones. Website targeting was the mainstay method and so this still fell under the First Contextual Age.

During the '90s, without intending to do any harm to the recognition of the importance of context in advertising, I conceived and with much help built the first addressable advertising system which was focused initially on television.

By the turn of the 21^st Century addressable TV ads were not yet the rage. A man who had been inspired by the idea of addressable ads while conferring with Next Century Media in the '90s called me one day and invited me to come over and see what he had done. He had created addressable ads in digital! That man was Dave Morgan. His company TACODA was later acquired by AOL. Again without intending to harm the contextual approach, but meaning to add the more precise and relevant targeting alongside context, I did some studies for Dave which showed that in digital, both CT (Context Targeting) and BT (Behavioral Targeting, meaning website viewing behavior which revealed the interest of the visitor) lifted advertising effectiveness, on average suggesting a bit more power in the addressable targeting than in the aggregated targeting based on context.

I was surprised years later when I heard many digital salespeople saying that context was now irrelevant, since ID targeting was better. I argued that the combination was the way to go. A few people listened to me.

Many more people started to hear this truth two years ago when the ARF decided it was a serious matter. ARF Executive Vice President Horst Stipp published a huge meta-analysis in the Journal of Advertising Research, and the ARF put out a formal CMO briefing subtitled Best Practice strongly advising that context be put back alongside targeting, that the two are orthogonal, i.e. additive (one does not replace the other).

This was the dawn of the New Contextual Age.

In September 2020, at the three-day virtual ARF Conference AUDIENCExSCIENCE, the one topic that reappeared again and again was context, with highly consilient results being proffered. And now the ARF is putting on a special webinar on the subject on Monday, November 9, 2020, from noon to 2 p.m., consisting of two special panels.

The first panel sheds new light on old questions about news as an advertising context, and the findings may surprise you, but I won't be a spoiler. Panelists include CNN's Executive Vice President Research and Scheduling Robin Garfield; NBCU's Senior Director, News Insights and Positioning Alex Gittleson, and Lumen's Founder and CEO Michael Follett. The moderator is Dartmouth College's and Merchant Mechanics' Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer, Kimberly Rose Clarke.

The second panel is about the hot new medium known as Programmatic Premium OTT/CTV, recently shown to have higher ROI than any other television or digital media type, and how contextual optimization works at the best practices cutting edge in that medium. Panelists include Nestle's Director of Marketing and E-Commerce Chris Nanos; Crackle's Executive Director Advanced Products and Partnerships George Castrissiades; Reset Digital's Founder and CEO Charles Cantu; Hearst's Chief Data Officer Michael Smith, and Mindshare Partner, Director Invention+ and Private Marketplace Lead Rachel Lowenstein. The moderator is Ipsos' Global Lead of Neuroscience Manuel Garcia-Garcia.

Hope you enjoy and profit!

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