Are you attracting the massive wave of ad dollars headed towards digital publishers? If you don’t have a contextually relevant video solution in place then you may be leaving money on the table.
When Google announced that they would be removing third-party cookies all the way back in January of 2020, they gave everyone in the industry a two-year headstart to create a plan. Then, one year later, Google extended that deadline to 2023, allowing advertisers more time to create a strategy to reach audiences and publishers to create friendly brand environments that didn’t require cookies.
Eight months out, it may seem like there is still time to formulate new strategies. But, in reality, the prevailing theory that contextual relevance would be the heir-apparent in a cookie-less kingdom has already taken shape.
Look no further than the Fox Corp launch of Atlas, an intelligence technology that can suggest contextual advertising opportunities for video buyers. One of the nation’s biggest names in media is betting big on contextual relevance.
And for good reason. IAB’s Fall Impact Study found that 74% of marketers will be investing in contextual relevance by the end of this year. A recent case study on contextual advertising across three separate industries (Pharma, FMCG and CPG) found that if there was a “mind/material alignment”, meaning that the material a user was consuming fell within their expectations of the environment, cost per action fell by a factor of six, while conversions rose by a factor of three.
Contextual relevance is no longer on the horizon or in the ether; it’s here and advertisers are spending big on it.
So how do you, the publisher, capitalize on this? More importantly, how do you not leave revenue on the table?
Experts have suggested publishers “double down on the basics”. Specifically quality, brand-safe content in relevant environments. Keep the “mind/material alignment” of your reader at heart. Ask yourself if what you’re putting on your page matches audience expectations because advertisers are now asking themselves the exact same question about contextual fit for their creatives.
STN Video has been predicting and preparing for the rise of contextual relevance for years before Google’s announcement that third-party cookies would be no more. It’s one of the reasons we developed Smart Match®, our AI-powered player that instantly matches your articles’ editorial to our library of more than one million videos from over 250 quality and brand-safe content providers. We have also released new initiatives in the past 12 months like our Recirculation Tool which displays a video carousel of trending, relevant headlines to a publisher’s audience, and AI-produced video stories that are specific and unique to every article.
Along with hosting webinars, writing blogs, providing guest insight and more, STN Video CEO Matthew Watson recently spoke on the importance of contextual relevance at Borrell Miami. He told the room of local publishers that they needed a video solution that provided relevance at every turn to satisfy these new ad budgets. And their best option would be to find a third-party video provider who specializes in it.
A publisher can write dozens, if not hundreds of pages of amazing content per day, but producing a relevant video-per-article is an impossible task and steals focus from the editorial side of operations. And if you aren’t able to ensure all the content on your page is relevant, new ad technologies like Atlas may skip your site altogether when looking to make their buy.
STN Video is happy to lend their expertise in this area to any publisher looking to increase the relevance on their page and attract more revenue. Contextual relevance is here and STN Video has the resources to help you thrive with it.
