Powered by AI, contextual advertising is having a revival with marketers
AI advancements are fueling a resurgence for contextual advertising by unlocking more media real estate across more surfaces and powering more effective content matching. Today the contextual marketing market size is worth around USD 198.4 billion, and it’s forecast to grow at a CAGR of 14.2% over the next ten years, reaching 748.5 billion by 2034.1 If you’re a marketer and you’re not considering contextual, you should be.
A renaissance for contextual advertising
Historically, contextual advertising was viewed by marketers as a safe haven strategy to power audience targeting in the “cookie-less” future and preserve brand safety. Both are strategic reasons to employ the tactic and still relevant. (The future efficacy of cookies is murky at best in light of consumer privacy choices.) But today, when I am speaking with brands and agencies, the move to contextual is not being made to protect against a downside but to capture upside.
Consider this: the majority of consumers prefer contextually relevant ads over those based on browsing history (94%)2 and consumers are more likely to look at an ad if it is relevant to the content they are reading (69%).3
Now consider this: AI’s ability to accurately understand and categorize content (tone, sentiment, and intent) is transforming the ability to identify “perfectly relevant” placements in real time across media properties.
The time is now for contextual advertising.
Bombora’s industry leading NLP unlocks potential
For more than 10 years, Bombora has been applying AI to understand and classify content in the B2B ecosystem. Specifically we have been building and training Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex natural language processing (NLP) challenges. Our models go well beyond simple key word identification. Our models are trained to understand the true context of content on a page, differentiate accurately between homonyms, and understand the relationship between topics. For example, our models can tell the difference between “cloud” in the sky and “cloud” computing. Further, to support our NLP capabilities, Bombora developed a one-of-a-kind topic taxonomy that grows every quarter – 17,000 topics and counting!
Bombora was founded to unlock the potential of the B2B ecosystem, for the benefit of the ecosystem. Consistent with this vision, we can now deploy our taxonomy and topic classification capabilities to unlock the potential of contextual advertising across the B2B web. For example, earlier this year we launched a new, first-to-market contextual targeting solution with Simpli.fi. Powered by Bombora’s topic taxonomy, Simpli.fi customers now have access to 76 highly relevant topics that represent content their target audiences are consuming. This offering was celebrated by the B2B advertising industry with a Dick Reed Award for Channel Advancements & Innovation.
Moving contextual into your mix
Advertising trends come and go, but strategies that drive superior performance tend to stick around. The time is now to consider how contextual advertising fits into your media strategy. To learn more about how Bombora can help, contact us.