In the dynamic landscape of modern advertising, strategic brand placement is essential for capturing the attention of vast audiences. One such golden opportunity lies within the fervor and excitement of March Madness, a premier collegiate basketball tournament that captivates the attention of millions of Americans each year.

According to reports, the advertising landscape during March Madness is marked by substantial investments, with spot prices ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars in the early stages to over $2 million for the NCAA Championship. The statistics speak volumes about the unique advertising environment presented by March Madness.

Did you know that 41% of March Madness viewers checked ad-addressable websites, most visiting new sites (Source: kortx.io).

An Overview of the March Madness Audience

In 2023 14.69 Millions viewers tuned in and March Madness emerged as a prime platform for advertisers seeking to make a significant impact.

• March Madness programming captures the attention of 65% of households, with an average viewing time of 9.25 hours per household throughout the tournament.
• Ads during March Madness reach 245% more households per commercial compared to ads in other programming. (Source: effectv)
• Streaming viewership on networks airing March Madness increases by 86% during the tournament compared to the preceding period.
• 66% of these fans have agreed they take action after seeing a brand’s sponsorship as they are watching their favorite team play. (Source: adweek)

Targeting an Enviable Audience: WalletHub reports that approximately 73% of March Madness viewers also tune in to local news, with almost half boasting a household income exceeding $100,000, and 51% falling within the 25 to 54 age range.

Maximizing Exposure: The tournament, spanning from Selection Sunday to the championship game, offers advertisers the opportunity to achieve high frequency and exposure, reaching a distinctive audience over a three-week period.

Elevate Creativity: Given the grand stage, generic creativity won’t suffice. Industry leaders have emphasized the importance of standing out, especially with such a discerning audience, for optimal advertising impact.

Elevate Your Video Game with Dynamic Video Ads During March Madness!

March Madness stands out as a premier sporting spectacle each year, drawing an ever-growing viewership as the tournament unfolds. Whether you missed a game, sought exclusive interviews, or craved expert predictions, the go-to platform for all things March Madness is YouTube.

In the previous year, the final four rounds of the tournament amassed a staggering 3 million hours of viewership on YouTube. However, it’s not just tournament content that attracts viewers; a Google survey revealed that March Madness fans exhibit a staggering 16x higher likelihood of watching sports news-related videos compared to the average YouTube user.

Delving deeper into the viewership patterns, advertisers and marketers are recognizing the unique opportunities presented by March Madness enthusiasts. A recent study discovered that these fans are 10 times more likely to engage with videos centered around athletic shoes, making them a highly lucrative audience for sports brands.

Beyond the tournament highlights and post-game interviews, March Madness fans exhibit a penchant for diverse sports content on YouTube. The same study highlighted that these fans are 13 times more likely to consume videos related to sports coaching and training compared to the average YouTube viewer. This presents a valuable opportunity for brands aiming to contextually target athletes or sports aficionados.

Contextual targeting, hinging on intent-based targeting, allows advertisers to align their content with users’ specific interests, elevating the probability of a positive response. According to recent findings, consumers targeted at the contextual level are 83% more likely to recommend the advertised product or service compared to those targeted at the audience or channel level. This underscores the importance of reaching consumers in the right mindset at the opportune moment, enhancing ad resonance and subsequently boosting purchase intent.

Source: thinkwithgoogle

How Silverpush’s Advanced Contextual Solution Can Help Brands?

Silverpush is at the forefront of guiding brands through the landscape of contextual advertising with its cutting-edge AI technology, “Mirrors“. This revolutionary platform is reshaping YouTube advertising by seamlessly integrating AI capabilities with human expertise, creating a foundation for ethical, fair, and transparent ad placements.

Intelligent Contextual Targeting

Mirrors employs advanced AI technology, particularly the Context Detection model, to identify key contextual elements within videos. This includes faces, logos, objects, actions, text, and audio. This thorough analysis ensures a nuanced understanding of content context.

Additionally, Mirrors utilizes a Language Detection model, enabling it to comprehend slang, dialects, and cultural nuances. This linguistic proficiency enhances accurate context analysis, providing advertisers with a deeper understanding of the content they associate their brands with.

Brand Safety & Suitability

Mirrors place a strong emphasis on brand safety and suitability. It utilizes custom Inclusion & Exclusion themes to further enhance the suitability of ad placements.

Covering all 12 GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) categories, Mirrors classifies content into three risk levels: Low, Medium, and High. This comprehensive approach ensures smart optimization by avoiding overblocking through intelligent risk balancing and advanced filtering mechanisms.

Human Augmented Filter

Mirrors combine AI efficiency with human oversight through a meticulous Human Augmented Filter. This dual-layered approach helps in full-proofing AI-extracted contexts, ensuring that ads align with the latest best practices.

The human element in the filtering process allows advertisers to stay current with industry trends, regulations, and ethical considerations. It acts as an additional layer of assurance, providing a dynamic and responsive framework for contextual advertising.

Conclusion

In the realm of sports events, every match is an opportunity to plant the seeds of brand recognition. Silverpush provides the tools to maximize this opportunity, offering advertisers the chance to sow the seeds of higher ROI and reap the fruits later.

Get in touch with our team today to learn how targeting YouTube categories like March Madness could be the ideal fit for your ads.

With the digital advertising industry rapidly evolving, it’s important to keep up with the latest trends and technologies. 

Contextual advertising, which has been a game-changer for brands to maximize their ROI, has helped them reach their target audience in a more relevant and personalized way. 

But, with the advent of newer technologies, even this life savior of brands after the apocalypse of third-party cookies requires an upgrade. 

Generative AI, which has taken the world by storm has revolutionized work and creativity, offering numerous benefits and opportunities. 

While many industries have already incorporated Generative AI into their business, contextual advertising is close and is also exploring how this technology can benefit them.

How will Generative AI Pave the Way for Contextual Advertising? 

Generative AI is a powerful technology that has the potential to transform the way advertisers reach their target audiences. 

Unlike traditional AI models, which rely on historical data, Generative AI can create new and unique data sets, enabling advertisers to expand their reach to audiences that were previously out of reach using traditional methods. 

This technology can identify patterns and correlations between seemingly unrelated data points, resulting in a more personalized and relevant advertising experience for users. 

With the ability to generate new data sets and identify new audience segments, Generative AI is opening up new possibilities for advertisers to reach their target audiences with greater accuracy and efficiency.

Silverpush X Generative AI: Changing the Advertising Game for Brands

In an age where privacy concerns are at an all-time high, relying on third-party cookies to reach relevant audiences has become increasingly challenging.

Silverpush, which is a hyper-contextual advertising company has incorporated Generative AI into its contextual AI platform- Mirrors to provide brands with an effective solution to target without the use of cookies.

The launch of a contextual planning tool powered by Generative AI represents a significant advancement in the capabilities of Silverpush’s flagship product, Mirrors. 

By incorporating next-generation AI capabilities, the tool further enhances Mirrors’ contextual offering, addressing the challenges of cookieless targeting and revolutionizing the digital advertising space.

How will it Benefit Advertisers?

1. This tool will enable advertisers to identify contextually relevant audiences without relying on third-party cookies.

2. The AI-powered contextual platform, Mirrors, will give access to a wide range of contextual signals that can be used to transform brands’ ad targeting strategies. 

3. Mirrors, powered by Generative AI, allow advertisers to gain insights into user behavior and preferences, leading to more precise targeting and a better user experience.

4. Generative AI can also solve the problem of users getting tired of seeing the same ad too many times (ad fatigue) and being shown too many ads (frequency capping), which can make them less likely to engage with the ads.  

5. By creating unique data sets and identifying new audience segments, advertisers can ensure that their ads are reaching the right users at the right time, without overwhelming them with too many ads.

Final Words

The integration of Generative AI into Silverpush’s contextual AI stack marks a significant advancement in the field of digital advertising. With this technology, advertisers can surpass the restrictions of traditional targeting methods and provide users with more personalized, relevant, and effective ad experiences. But, there’s more to it than you think. Stay tuned for our next blog on Gen AI, where we dive deeper into the potential of this groundbreaking technology and reveal some major possibilities for advertisers. 

Over the last few years, the term Brand Safety has exploded in its use, especially when describing the digital advertising. Today, brands are not only cautious about their content but they are also focusing on the environment and platform in which their advertisements are being placed.

In a 2019 study by Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) and Brand Safety Institute (BSI), it was revealed that around 80% of consumers will stop or reduce buying products in which the advertisements were placed across harmful or offensive content, whereas around 70% directly blamed the brand or the agency for ads over sensitive content. With flood of harmful content floating on the internet these days, various advertisers are looking for an effective brand safety solution when it comes to contextual advertising.

Silverpush’s Focus on Brand Safety

Various brand safety solutions that advertisers are currently using aren’t offering desired results. Silverpush’s brand safety solutions are focused on preventing damage to brands’ image: Mirrors Brand Safety. It’s an effective AI-powered technology that offers various sort of safety and suitability solutions to the advertisers. This is effective enough to ensure a good level of brand safety.

How do Mirrors Brand Safety Work?

Mirrors Brand Safety is an AI-powered in-video key contexts identification service that offers brand protection solutions that are unique to you, providing utmost protection from harmful or inappropriate video advertising environments.

It uses computer vision to filter out brand-specific, pre-defined, harmful content. Besides this, it also offers controls beyond custom blanket exclusion measures.

What makes Mirrors Brand Safety Unique?

With some other brand safety solutions available in the market, what makes Mirror Brand Safety set-apart from others? This not only promises brand safety but also delivers brand-suitable environment. Some of the other features which makes Mirror brand safety unique on its own are – 

• Context relevant omission

The intensely trained AI models identifies  custom-defined inappropriate or unsafe contexts like actions, objects, faces, and scenes in a streaming video. 

• Utmost Brand suitability

Mirrors Brand Safety high-grade algorithm offers a comprehensive brand suitability solution, that not only measures the safety and suitability of the content, but also the page and the channel.

• Ad placement control

Mirrors Brand Safety controls and analyzes all video ad placement, right before an impression is served. It leads to utmost brand suitability and safety for ad campaigns.

• In-depth analysis

It helps in getting an accurate pre, mid, and post-campaign analysis. Predefined elements can be seen in your dashboard with Mirrors amazing depth charts for visual details.

Why Mirrors Brand Safety should be Every Marketer’s First Choice?

A brand safety solution that uses AI-powered contextual advertising is not only the best but also the most effective and advanced solution to major brand safety problems. AI-powered contextual brand safety technology – Mirrors Brand Safety accurately comprehends nuances in context, and perhaps, does not leads to over-blocking of the content, unlike traditional solutions.

Other than just harmful contexts such as obscenity, terrorism, etc., Mirrors Brand Safety can also identify brand-defined inappropriate content, thus offering brand suitability with brand safety. 

Conclusion

If you’re a marketer who’s looking for a brand safety solution that is intensely effective, does not block suitable content, and doesn’t kill an ad campaign’s reach, then you should go for the AI-powered contextual brand safety solutions – “Mirrors Brand Safety.”

When targeting ads to consumers, marketers give importance to creative and demographics of audience. But these are not the only factors that marketers should take into account. A recent research study shows that consumers’ perception of video ads and effectiveness of video advertising are affected by the context in which the ads are viewed.

The study found that the quality and trustworthiness of the surrounding content are among the key factors influencing the effectiveness of video ads. It examined the impact of the context in which video ads are seen on the performance of ads and the viewers’ perception of ads. The surrounding content should not only be contextually relevant but should also ensure brand safety.

The study involved testing the performance of pre-roll video ads when surrounded by different types of content across different kinds of environments.The three different kinds of content against which the video ads were placed were as follows – content from premium publishers, content generated by users but from established creators, and content generated by users but from everyday people.

The study included more than forty-five hundred participants. A variety of combinations of content and ads were delivered to the mobile phones of the study participants across distinct environments, viz. – non-feed environment on a video aggregator, in-feed environment on a social media platform – Twitter, and non-feed environment on publisher sites.

Effectiveness of Video Advertising

The findings of the study are important for contextual advertising companies. The study revealed that the type of content adjacency significantly influences performance of a brand’s ad. When video ads were surrounded by high-quality and highly trustworthy content, an increase of twelve percent in participants’ purchase intent was observed because of high trustworthiness, while an increase of nine percent in buying intent was observed because of high quality. High-quality and highly trustworthy content scores high on brand safety.

Premium content fetched a greater positive opinion from study participants in comparison to user generated content. Therefore, brands whose video ads were placed against premium content were perceived by the participants as more interesting and favorable.

Video ads placed against user generated content created by established content creators were regarded by participants as more trustworthy and relevant in comparison to the video ads placed against user generated content created by average or non-established content creators.

To participants, non-feed pre-roll video ads appeared as more forced upon them in comparison to in-feed pre-roll video ads. Participants found in-feed pre-roll video ads to be more relevant in comparison to the non-feed video ads. In-feed video ads had more positive impact on participants’ buying intent and brand favorability in comparison to control.

The study clearly shows the importance of the quality of surrounding content in video advertising. By using AI-powered contextual advertising technology, marketers can precisely place ads against high-quality and contextually relevant content, thereby boosting brand favorability, brand trust and purchase intent, and creating deeper connections between consumers and brands.

It is a common observation for marketers that people pay attention to some of the ads they come across but not to others. In order to study this behavior of people, Google recently conducted a consumers’ eye movement research.

The study was conducted among the Australian consumers and involved more than twenty-eight hundred ads. Eye-tracking glasses were given to the study participants, which enabled researchers to evaluate participants’ real-time viewing behavior both inside their homes and outside.

By making use of the wearable technology, researchers were able to clearly assess the attention of study participants. Researchers were able to identify the ads to which participants paid attention across varied environments, platforms, and devices. The study provided insights on the challenges that brands and their partner video advertising companies face when they have to capture and maintain the attention of consumers.

The study found that viewers’ attention to ads and effectiveness of advertising are directly correlated. Although ad reach and exposure are important metrics to evaluate success of an ad campaign, they fail to provide information to marketers on whether their ads were able to capture attention of their audiences. Nowadays, people are exposed to a lot more ads and distractions in comparison to the past. In order to truly assess the effectiveness of ad campaigns, marketers need to know whether attention of their audiences got captured or not.

A previous research revealed that a significant correlation exists between consumers’ attention and ads’ impact. Irrespective of the format of an ad or the type of device used to see an ad, the longer an ad is watched by the people, greater is their level of ad recall. Another study found that people who both watched and heard ads had 2.7 times more recall in comparison to those who only heard ads but not watched them. Thus, an ad casts a lesser impact on a person present in front of a screen on which the ad is appearing, but talking to someone.

Google’s eye-tracking study found that the share of eyes on screen was highest for YouTube at sixty-four percent in comparison to fifty-four percent for catch-up TV and forty-nine percent for free-to-air TV. Thus, YouTube videos drive most attention. By partnering with an online video ad agency, a brand can capitalize on this finding.

Attention is low for TV in comparison to online videos because TV ad breaks are longer and predictable. People plan for these predictable ad breaks in advance, and during the break do tasks such as prepare tea, talk to someone, etc. But in case of YouTube, varied ad formats and shorter duration of ads make YouTube advertising less predictable. Moreover, forty-three percent of YouTube viewers carry their devices along with them while doing other tasks. This enables them to view YouTube videos from anywhere.

Google’s eye-tracking study found that choice, creative and context cast significant impact on attention. Marketers should give preference to contextual advertising over behavioral advertising. Today, people have a choice to watch at any time whatever they want. When people watch content of their choice, they pay a good amount of attention to it. The same applies to online video ads – many of the ads on the 2019 Australian YouTube ads leaderboard were more than two minutes long. The study found that in case of skippable ads, people watched the YouTube ad itself rather than looking at the skip button, and then decided to keep watching the ad or skipping it.

Viewers prefer to watch ads that are interesting. Creative used in a YouTube ad campaign should be able to grab attention of viewers right from the beginning of the ad. Google’ study found that ads having maximum recall used optimized visual language and narrative structure in order to target specific audiences and platforms.

The study found that for many participants, attention was more when they consumed content while commuting in comparison to when they were in their homes. This is because people tend to choose content to watch according to their surroundings. While commuting, people know how much time they can devote to watching content, choose their content accordingly, and watch it with full attention and less distractions.

By utilizing the valuable insights provided by the above-mentioned research, marketers can run ad campaigns that can grab attention of maximum consumers.

Digital advertising has become an indispensable tool for marketers to achieve their advertising goals. Broadly speaking, there are two main types of digital advertising – behavioral and contextual.

The debate on contextual advertising vs behavioral advertising has always troubled the marketers. Behavioral advertising targets ads on the basis of user data such as websites visited, products viewed, purchase history, etc. It makes use of third-party cookies to reach consumers, irrespective of contextual relevance. On the other hand, contextual advertising involves showing ads that are contextually relevant to the content a user is consuming.

Major web browsers like Safari and Firefox have already blocked third-party cookies, and Google’s Chrome browser has started phasing out these cookies. Besides third-party cookies’ blocking, privacy regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have made it difficult for marketers to continue using behavioral advertising. As contextual advertising does not involve the use of consumers’ personal data, it appears to be the best alternative to behavioral advertising.

A recent research study has shown that contextual advertising is more cost-efficient than behavioral ad targeting. Four big companies took part in the study. Five campaigns were run in order to compare contextual advertising and behavioral advertising in terms of efficiency. The five campaigns included one behavioral advertising campaign and four contextual advertising campaigns. The four contextual advertising campaigns were run by four different contextual advertising companies.

All of the five campaigns were setup identically and used the same ad unit. The number of impressions was same for each of the campaigns. For comparing the cost efficiency of contextual advertising and behavioral advertising, three measures were considered, viz. – Cost per mille in-demo impressions or In-Demo eCPM (cost of reaching desired demographic), Cost per click or CPC, and Cost per mille viewable impressions or vCPM. For viewable impressions, Media Rating Council’s standard was followed, i.e., fifty percent of ad visible for at least one continuous second.

The study found that contextually targeted impressions were significantly less costly than behaviorally targeted impressions, contextual eCPM being thirty-six percent lesser than behavioral eCPM. The cost per click (CPC) for contextually targeted ads was found to be forty-eight percent lesser than the cost per click for behaviorally targeted ads. After considering CPMs for every ad line, the cost per mille viewable impressions (vCPM) for contextually targeted ads was found to be forty-one percent lower than behaviorally targeted ads.

The study concluded that for all of the three cost efficiency metrics, contextual ad targeting was significantly better than behavioral ad targeting.

It is clear that in the era of data privacy regulations and cookie-less browsers, contextual advertising not only offers an effective and safe way of targeting ads to consumers, but also provides more cost-efficiency than behavioral advertising.

The digital advertising landscape is increasingly shifting towards contextual relevance. Brands are using contextual advertising approach for connecting with the right consumers with the right message and at the right time.

A recent survey study has shown that the quality of the environment in which a brand’s ads are placed influences consumers’ perception of the ads and the brand. The online survey, which involved more than a thousand participants, aimed to find out the kinds of ads that people prefer to see in different types of environments, and how context and sentiment of the content of a webpage affect people’s feelings towards the ads placed on that page and the associated brands.

The results of the survey are highly favorable to contextual targeting companies. Seventy percent of the survey participants stated that it is important, at least to some degree, that digital ads placed on a page are relevant to the page’s content. This means people value seeing ads that are in line with the content they are consuming.

Seventy-four percent of the survey participants, i.e., about three in four participants, stated that they like to see those ads on a web page that match with the content of the page. This finding reveals the preference of consumers for contextually relevant ads.

Seventy-two percent of the participants said that the content surrounding a digital ad impacts their perception of the ad. This finding reveals that people not only just give preference to the ads that are contextually relevant to the surrounding content, but also perceive them in a better way. The content of a web page influences the opinion of people about the ads on that page.

When participants were shown content from different content categories such as entertainment, finance, shopping, etc., their ad preference was found to be consistent, i.e. for each of the different content types, they always preferred to see ads contextually relevant to that content type. Thus, by leveraging the expertise of contextual advertising companies, brands can achieve unprecedented reach and engagement.

Fifty-six percent of the participants stated that they form a more favorable opinion towards a brand whose ads are contextually relevant. Sixty percent said that they are likely to remember ads that align well with the content of the page.

A piece of content can communicate a positive, neutral, or negative feeling to the people consuming it. Majority of the participants, i.e. seventy-two percent, said that the sentiment of the content they consume influences their feelings towards the brands whose ads are shown against that content.

The survey study found that, on average, participants were more receptive to content that conveyed positive or neutral feelings. Participants also showed increased favorability towards the brands whose ads appeared against content with positive or neutral sentiment. Moreover, participants showed increased memorability for ads placed against content with positive or neutral sentiment.

By understanding how context and sentiment affect consumers’ perception of ads and brands, marketers can boost consumers’ engagement with ads and brands.

In the wake of phasing out of third-party cookies and rising brand safety issues, advertisers are increasingly adopting contextual targeting. But there are still prevailing certain myths that are making some marketers hesitant in implementing contextual targeting.

This article tries to bust these myths so that marketers get a clear picture of contextual targeting.

Myth 1: Contextual targeting is a simple, keyword-based approach

It is true that previously contextual targeting was based entirely on keywords, but this is not the case now. Today, we have machine learning and AI-powered contextual targeting technology that delivers unparalleled results.

Conventional contextual advertising involves targeting desired keywords in web addresses, titles, meta descriptions, tags, page content, etc. for placement of relevant ads. Similarly, conventional brand safety techniques involve avoiding ad placement against content having blacklisted keywords.

Conventional keyword-based techniques can lead to decrease in a campaign’s reach by labeling brand safe content as unsafe. For example, if a food company wants to run its ads against food content and has put alcohol in the list of blocked keywords, then by using conventional contextual advertising approach, its ads will be blocked not only against drunk driving content but also against content featuring recipes that use alcohol just as one of the ingredients. This will cast a negative impact on the campaign’s reach.

Thus, traditional keyword-based approach fails to understand nuances in context. This limitation has been overcome by contextual targeting technology powered by artificial intelligence. This technology maximizes reach, while ensuring brand safety and brand suitability.

Myth 2: Contextual targeting is less effective than cookie-based approach

This is completely untrue. Research shows that contextual ad targeting offers significantly high neural engagement and ad recall, when compared to random ad placements. Moreover, it has been found that there is a considerable increase in consumers’ purchase intent when they are exposed to ads that are contextually relevant to the content they are consuming.

The results of a marketing survey, in which over one thousand people participated, show that for the majority of consumers, it is important that ads which they see on a web page are contextually relevant to the content on that page.

Majority of the survey’s respondents showed increased favorability towards brands showing contextually relevant ads. Memorability for contextually aligned ads was also found to be significantly greater than randomly placed ads. Moreover, survey found that consumers not only prefer contextually aligned ads, but also form a better perception and opinion of them.

Myth 3: It is less cost-efficient in comparison to cookie-based advertising

When it comes to cost efficiency, contextual advertising is far better than cookie-based behavioral advertising. The cost of contextual ad impressions is considerably less than behavioral ad impressions. Research shows that effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM), cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand viewable impressions (vCPM) for contextual ads are significantly less than cookie-based ads.

In a study conducted in partnership with Dentsu Aegis Network, eCPM for contextual ads was found to be thirty-six percent less than that for third-party cookie-based ads. CPC for ads that were contextually targeted came out to be forty-eight percent less than CPC for ads that involved cookie-based targeting, while contextual vCPM was less than behavioral vCPM by forty-one percent.

Myth 4: Contextual targeting offers same results, irrespective of the provider

Although marketers should always go for AI-powered contextual ad targeting over conventional keyword-based technique, no two AI tech offering contextual advertising companies are equal in driving results. Marketers should choose a company that has many years of expertise and experience in contextual ad placement. The chosen company should have well-trained, refined and powerful machine learning and AI algorithms in order to drive excellent results.

The above myth-busting discussion will help marketers in better understanding contextual targeting, so that they can confidently use it to effectively achieve their advertising and brand safety goals.