CANNES – Marketers want their advertising to appear amid high-quality content that improves the likelihood that consumers will see it and consider buying different products and services. These contextual ads are regaining significance as marketers confront the loss of signals from device IDs and tracking cookies that help with online targeting.
“We’ve got to be in quality, good environments and you can drive better media outcomes that way,” Joshua Lowcock, global chief media officer at UM Worldwide, said in this interview with correspondent Tameka Kee at the Beet Villa during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“If you chase context, you might chase inappropriate context and so we use a phrase called “misaligned content,” Lowcock said. “What that means is not that there’s unsafe places to advertise, but the receptivity to a message might not be as good in certain environments.”
Responsible Media Spending Includes News
Many traditional news outlets saw declines in advertising revenue as audiences moved to digital media. In some cases, marketers have been reluctant to place their ads within the context of negative news, such as pandemic death counts or stories about disasters. UM Worldwide urged advertisers to avoid withdrawing from news.
“Probably in the second week of the pandemic told everyone don’t avoid COVID, COVID-19, coronavirus,” Lowcock said. “We basically sent a global communication going, unfortunately this is going to be around and a topic of conversation everywhere until the end of time, so you can’t avoid news and you can’t avoid this as a keyword.”
He said they look for news outlets the practice independent journalism without an overt political bias.
“We look at editorial standards, integrity, transparency, avoiding disinformation and disinformation, and ensuring we advertise in those environments and we drive our clients to advertise there,” Lowcock said. “In fact, one of our clients when we did that we actually saw better performance in all sorts of metrics.”
You are watching “Contextual Advertising Emerging: Now Key in Driving Performance,” a Beet.TV Leadership Summit at Cannes Lions 2022, presented by Integral Ad Science.
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