Even though Google has postponed the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome until late 2023, the online ad industry still needs to continue putting its efforts in finding possible alternatives on how to target viewers efficiently, when it eventually happens.
And while being just one of the many potential solutions, contextual advertising will perhaps remain among the key focus points for digital video ad businesses in 2021.
Finding the Power of Context in Video
First thing first, even though contextual advertising has been around for years, it hasn’t become a big hit in the video ad niche right away.
The reason is, actually, self-explanatory. Even though contextual targeting isn’t new as a concept, the evolution of its functional core has been stumbling around metadata for quite a long time. And given there’s much less accessible metadata in video content, the power of context was somewhat leashed until the AI-powered tech came along.
Anyhow, things are way different today, in 2021.
Fueled by the looming deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome, along with the gradually stricter mobile platform policies towards user data privacy, contextual video advertising has found its way to “re-emerge”, having evolved into its better and mightier version.
Current Variety of Contextual Video Advertising Tech
Aside from a multitude of upgraded, yet still relatively more conventional solutions, based upon video metadata (i.e video URL, title/description, tags. etc.) analysis, contextual video ad tech goes far beyond in terms of capabilities it’s currently offering to digital businesses.
Namely, some of the key dimensions include:
- Content recognition tech
Contrary to the mere analysis of data “surrounding” the video, content recognition tech implies the AI-powered analysis of video content itself, either using image recognition, or audio recognition, or both.
Such aggregated data enables to further enhance predictive models, hence powering up the brands’ contextual targeting capabilities.
- Performance & behavioral analysis
This type of contextual ad tech enables combining video metadata info with the actual video ad performance and viewership patterns to derive less obvious, yet equally effective contextual signals for video advertisers.
- Contextual data marketplaces
While some businesses perceive this niche as somewhat “grey”, contextual data marketplaces aggregate massive loads of performance and behavioral data from different sources, hence enabling video advertisers to elevate their predictive analysis to the next level.
2022 – 2023 Contextual Video Ad Trends
From what we can forecast at this point, data marketplaces are already becoming a “dying breed”, due to the introduction of stricter privacy protection laws & regulations, which leave little to no access to accurate, yet legally obtained audience data for aggregation purposes.
At the same time, what can become the new hot trend in 2022-2023 is the development of complex contextual video advertising solutions that will immerse all existing capabilities, and include the upgraded AI functional core, too.
This trend might be especially noticeable in the CTV advertising niche, specifically due to a number of large M&As, already announced in 2021.
More importantly, their introduction will inevitably silence down the skeptics, currently reluctant to utilize contextual targeting, supposedly given its lack of precision and effectiveness.
Searching for more info, regarding online video advertising trends? Check out the AdPlayer.Pro outlook on the state of social video advertising in 2021.