Don’t be blinded by contextual relevance
The potential rewards for combining both contextual relevance and site performance are sizeable. However, no matter how contextually relevant a site is to an ad campaign, if it is slow, glitchy or muddled with ads, the media buy will not resonate with the end user. In chasing the holy grail of contextual targeting, it is important to resist the temptation to shoe horn in poorly-constructed websites just because their content seems a great fit for the campaign.
Scale is important, but hard to achieve
The learnings from the test form a model for constructing a thoroughly-planned contextual media buy. The rigour that was applied to testing and curating the publisher sites cannot be carried out for every media buy and at all scales. However, moving into a media landscape which will be governed by the GDPR, the thought processes that media planners and buyers will have to exercise if they want to ensure their digital advertising continues to reach audiences cost-effectively and in a way that will resonate, have been shown.
Build your own whitelist
Build out a repository of publishers whose webpages are hospitable environments for ads. This knowledge can then be overlaid onto a variety of different campaigns and media buys, ensuring that any curated or stock whitelist is cleansed of poorly-developed web properties. Storing up this kind of knowledge will allow agencies and advertisers to run a more refined, more sophisticated form of contextual targeting, at scale.
