Context Trumps Intuition: Why CTV and Video Ads Often Perform Better Next to Unexpected Content

The useful part

For CTV And Video, The Most Obvious Contextual Audiences Don't Always Produce The Best Results | AdExchanger: You'd probably have the most success buying ad inventory against an NBA game or some other live sporting event, right? According to his company's internal research, Nike ads actually perform four times better against cooking content than they do against basketball content.

How it works

• Over time, however, company leadership realized that the consumer interaction data they'd accrued.
• So CatapultX changed its name to Qortex and pivoted to tracking how video influences audiences, rather than the typical age, gender and geolocation demographics that traditionally dictate ad targeting.
• How it works Qortex's video intelligence platform ingests information like a campaign's objectives and its start and end dates, then offers up the audience segments or content categories that it predicts...
• It can also give advertisers feedback on how their video creative will land with certain audiences.
• Using Qortex's technology, however, Coegi found that educational videos about complex topics actually yielded much better performance results.

What to take from it

In Rosenberg's view, publishers tend to be more focused on selling audiences rather than content, which is a problem for two reasons. And, in other cases, like the complex educational videos that Coegi ended up buying against, it helps monetize high-performing content that would have otherwise gone overlooked because it wasn't the most intuitive fit. Not to mention, some TV programs that cater to arguably more valuable niche audiences tend not to be as buzzy or attention-grabbing as more general-audience fare like reality TV.

Example or evidence

• The startup launched as CatapultX in late 2020 and was best known for building a series of addressable in-video ad experiences called On-Stream.
• If that consumer is watching a video about how to build a deck, then their plans for the weekend.
• Publishers Chrome Has A New Way To Measure Ad Overload On The Web Chrome is introducing new metrics that give advertisers and publishers a more data-driven picture of what users actually experience on...
• could help advertisers better understand what kind of content drives that consumer behavior in the first place.

Details worth keeping

Let's say you're developing a connected TV marketing campaign for Nike. Not so, Qortex CEO and founder Zack Rosenberg told me. "It's all about trying to align with the audience that's consuming the content, and you can only do that if you understand the content," said Rosenberg.

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